
I 305 "^ 

Book .bf 

PRESENTED BY 



THE 

EARLIEST SOURCES 

FOR THE 

LIFE OF JESUS 

BY 

F. CRAWFORD BURKITT d.d., f.b.a. 

NORRISIAN PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE 
ONIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 



NEW AND REVISED EDITION 



NEW YORK 

E. p. BUTTON AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 






New and Revised Edition igzz 



^^U.,^J-^^^2My 



All fights reserved 



Printed in Greot Britmn by Butler & Tanner, Promt and London 






CONTENTS 



I. 


Preliminary Considerations 
Marks of Genuineness : 


PAOB 

7-31 




^ ewish Topography 


18 




^ ewish Language 


22 




^ ewish Thought 


28 


II. 


The Synoptic Problem 


32-46 




The Priority of Mark 


33 




The Identification of Q 


38 


IIL 


The Gospel according to Mark 
The Kingdom of God and the " Son of 


47-76 




Man" 


56 




Influence of the Book of Enoch 


64 




Outline of the Story as given by Mark 


69 


IV. 


Possible " Sources " of the Gospkl of 






Mark 


77-94 




John Mark 


80 




Inaccuracies : 






Abiathar 


85 




Jewish Ablutions 


86 




Date of the Last Supper 


87 




Simon Peter 


89 



CONTENTS 

V. The Composition of Matihew and p^^^ 

Luke 95-116 

Matthew and Luke contrasted 96 

Narrative of tlie non-Marcan Parts of Luke 97 
Did Q contain a Passion Story ? 103 

The " Peraean Source " of Luke 106 

General Faithfulness of Matthew and Luke 109 
Matthew's Treatment of Mark no 

Luke's Treatment of Mark 112 

Note on Recent Reconstructions of " Q " 116 

Bibliography 121-124 

Epilogue 125 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND 
EDITION 

This second edition of Sources differs very 
little from the first, partly because the 
limited size and scope of the work allowed 
for little change, but still more because 
there are very few changes that I wish 
to make. It may seem to some that I 
have given excessive space to the Gospel 
according to Mark, but I am convinced 
that not even yet is the supreme historical 
importance of that work sufficiently appre- 
ciated either by the general public or by 
many professed scholars. If my little 
book has stimulated anyone to study it 
more closely for themselves, it will not 
have been written in vain. 

F. C. BURKITT, 
Cambridge^ 192 1. 



THE EARLIEST SOURCES 
FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

I 

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 

" The originator of that name/' — ^Taci- 
tus is speaking of those whom the common 
people in Rome, as he says, called " Chris- 
tians " as a term of reproach, — " the origi- 
nator of that name, one Christus, had been 
executed in the reign of Tiberius by order 
of the Administrator, Pontius Pilate." 
The contemptuous sentence of the Roman 
historian ^ is the only information about 
the life and career of Jesus of Nazareth 
that has come down to us independently 
of Christian tradition. So far as it goes, 
however, it agrees with what we read in the 

^ Annals, xv. 44. 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

Gospels : Pontius Pilate occupies in the 
statement of Tacitus the same place that 
he occupies in the Church's Creed. He 
stands there to mark the date of the 
Crucifixion. 

The Christian Church grew up in ob- 
scurity under conditions that were by no 
means favourable to the preservation of ac- 
curate historical reminiscences of its earliest 
beginnings. By the time the Christians 
began to preserve in writing the record of 
the origin of their religion, deep and ever- 
widening gulfs had intervened between 
them and the events. Jesus was born a 
Jew, and he lived and died among his own 
countrymen in Palestine ; his religion took 
root in the great cities on the eastern half 
of the Mediterranean. The first disciples, 
the men who had really known the Master, 
according to the flesh, were Aramaic-speak- 
ing Semites ; in a couple of generations 
the great majority of Christians were 
Greek-speaking townsfolk, mixed perhaps 
in blood, but educated wholly in Greek 
ways of thought. In the interval the 
Jewish State had been annihilated by the 
8 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 

forces of the Roman Empire, and what 
remained of the earliest community of 
disciples had been broken up. 

But the cause that most of all tended to 
make the Christians careless of preserving 
the memory of the past was that their 
minds were set upon the future, the future 
which they believed was immediately in 
store for them and for all the world. 
They, the first Christian converts, had 
obeyed the call to save themselves from 
the crooked generation of their contem- 
poraries.^ They had turned from idols to 
serve a living and true God and to wait for 
His Son from heaven, whom He raised 
from the dead, even Jesus, their deliverer 
from the wrath to come.^ That genera- 
tion, some of them at least, would not taste 
of death till they saw the Kingdom of God 
come.^ Jesus their Lord was not only the 
Faithful Witness, the First-born of the 
dead ; " behold," they said, " he cometh 
with the clouds ; and every eye shall 
see him, and they also which pierced him ; 

1 Acts ii. 40. 2 I Thess. i. 9, 

* Mark ix, i, and parallels. 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

all the tribes of the earth shall mourn over 
him."^ 

The time was at hand — the time of the 
judgment of the heathen and the vindica- 
tion of the Saints. What was the use of 
looking back to the humble life of the Son 
of God on earth, save perhaps to record his 
final victory over death, which was the 
earnest and prelude of his immediately ex- 
pected Presence in glory ? In the events 
of his earthly career the believers took little 
interest : if they looked back at all, it was 
to declare that the Lord himself had insti- 
tuted the rite of the common meal for 
Vv^hich they met week by week, and that 
he had prescribed the form of their daily 
prayer to their Father in Heaven. This is 
no fancy picture. It reflects the general 
attitude of Christians towards the life of 
Jesus on earth, which we can gather from 
monuments of early Christianity so repre- 
sentative and so different from one another 
as the New Testament epistles and the 
ancient Christian manual known as the 
'' Didache.'' 

* Rev. i. 7, 
10 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 

The New Age came in a form very differ- 
ent from what had been so confidently ex- 
pected. The little companies of believers 
did not live to see their Lord appear visibly 
on the clouds of heaven. Instead of being 
caught up alive in clouds to meet the 
Lord in the air,^ they went one by one to 
their graves, leaving their successors to 
carry on the work and the traditions of the 
Christian Society. Naturally the changed 
conditions reacted upon Christian theo- 
logy, upon the Christian view of the 
Church and of the dispensation in which it 
found itself. St. Paul himself seems to 
have been the first to realise the new world. 
He learned to see in the Death of the 
Christ not merely the last act, the last cata- 
strophe of the old dispensation, but also a 
process which the individual believer had 
mystically to undergo on earth, so that 
the historical event of the Crucifixion 
remained an ever-present reality to the 
members of the Christian community.^ 

" Crucified under Pontius Pilate '^ — in 

1 I Thess. iv. 17. 

^ See Rom. vi. 3-6 ; Col. i. 12 ff. 

n 



Sources for the life of jesus 

this phrase we see the indispensable germ 
of history in the Christian Creed. As the 
believers meditated yet further upon the 
nature of their Lord, they perceived that 
he was no chance favourite of Heaven, but 
one who had been destined to fulfil his 
high career in the fulness of time. The 
Church was the inheritor of the promises 
made to the fathers of old ; it hardly needed 
tradition for them to believe that the Lord 
Jesus had come of the seed of David ac- 
cording to the Scriptures. At the same 
time both their own devotion, and the doc- 
trine of such Jewish books as the Book of 
Enoch, assured them that the Elect One 
had existed from the first with the Most 
High. It is not surprising to find that 
there grew up a belief that his birth was 
miraculous, showing that he was in some 
sense both God and man. The statements 
about Jesus Christ which we find in the 
Creed are such as might have been antici- 
pated. 

It is also not very surprising that at 
length a book should have been written 
which professes to give an account of the 

12 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 

earthly doings and sayings of the Lord, 
which, setting forth from his eternal pre- 
existence with the Father, declares his 
claims to divine authority, exhibits his 
unbounded power over disease, over na- 
ture, and over death itself, and then goes 
on to relate how he voluntarily gave him- 
self up to be crucified, and, when all was 
finished, tells how he appeared to his faith- 
ful friends and disciples ; a book written 
that the readers might believe that Jesus 
is the Christ, and that believing they might 
have life in his name.^ Such a book as the 
Gospel according to Saint John we might 
expect to spring up within the Church and 
be accepted as the official account of the 
Incarnation of the Son of God. 

I have begun this discussion of the ear- 
liest historical sources for the life of Jesus 
with the ^* Apostles' Creed '' and the 
Fourth Gospel rather than with the docu- 
ments that modern criticism regards as 
giving us materials for history, because I 
venture to think that the first thing needed 
to enable the modern investigator to judge 
^ John XX. 21, 

13 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

the surviving documents aright is the at- 
tempt to look at them rather from the 
point of viev/ of the early Christians than 
from that of our own aims and desires. It 
is sometimes felt to be a matter of surprise 
or regret that modern investigators of the 
Gospel History reject so much of the tra- 
ditional matter as unhistorical ; it is re- 
garded as a matter of surprise or regret 
that so small an amount of the '' Gospels,'' 
canonical or uncanonical, is found to come 
up to our modern standard of what history 
should be. Closely connected with this 
feeling is the vague expectation that the 
spade of the explorer in Egypt or Palestine 
will some day dig up something of revo- 
lutionary importance, something that will 
let us go, so to speak, behind the scenes of 
the rise of Christianity. This expectation 
has been doomed again and again to dis- 
appointment, interesting as the discoveries 
of the last fifty years have been to those 
who know within what limits we may hope 
to gain accessions to our knowledge. It is 
unlikely that such a revolutionary docu- 
ment ever existed, or, if it ever existed, 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 

that it would have been copied and pre- 
served. There were no disinterested ob- 
servers of early Christianity. Those who 
did not " believe " had no reason for 
analysing the elements of what must 
have seemed to them to be a new and 
vulgar superstition ; so that our knowledge 
of it comes exclusively from the works of 
already convinced Christians. The ques- 
tion that the scientific investigator has to 
ask is not why so much of our material 
seems to be, strictly speaking, unhistorical, 
but how it comes to pass that any real his- 
torical memory of Jesus Christ was pre- 
served. It is easy enough to explain the 
genesis of the Creed, and the existence and 
general scope of such a document as the 
Fourth Gospel. The real problem is the 
survival of the Gospel according to Mark. 
The difference of standpoint between the 
ancient and modern world that is clearly 
apprehended by all reflecting persons at 
the present day concerns the course of 
Nature and the domain of Physical Science. 
We all of us have some idea of the ob- 
served uniformity of nature, and we regard 

15 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

what are called " miracles ^' as at least un- 
likely, even if we do not regard them as 
impossible. Now it is quite evident that 
the early Christians did not regard ^^ mira- 
cles " as unlikely, in the sense that we re- 
gard them as unlikely. The Gospels, and 
many other early Christian documents, 
are full of miracles, and in some quarters 
this raises a prejudice against them, or at 
least against the stories which contain a 
" miraculous '' element. On the other 
hand, there are no miracles in the " Ser- 
mon on the Mount," or in the fragmentary 
document dug up a few years ago at 
Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, and commonly 
called " Sayings of Jesus '' ; such pieces of 
tradition as these are often therefore ac- 
cepted with little or no serious criticism 
as being genuine and authentic, merely 
because they claim to be so. But this is 
fundamentally unscientific. It is of course 
logical enough for the thorough-going 
traditionalist to accept the " Sermon 
on the Mount " as genuine and authentic, 
because it is part of the authoritative tra- 
dition of the Church, and to look with 
i6 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 

very great suspicion upon the Oxyrhyn- 
chus " Sayings," because they were not 
included in the Church's tradition. But 
those who feel themselves free to criticise 
the Gospel miracles are bound to examine 
the credentials of the Gospel Sayings. 

A truly scientific historical criticism is 
both stricter and more catholic than popu- 
lar liberalism. It does not expect from any 
document an impossible standard of truth- 
fulness and accuracy. Even the modern 
astronomer in a scientific observatory has 
his irreducible personal equation ; even 
the actual eye-witness will tell his tale with 
variations after the lapse of a few years. 
Even if we incline to disbelieve in miracu- 
lous interference with the course of nature, 
that does not mean that we have any right 
to treat stories which contain a miraculous 
element as if they were mere free inven- 
tions. The real question that must be 
asked is, in the first place, one of origin 
rather than of faithfulness. 

It may not be out of place, before exa- 
mining the Synoptic Gospels and other 

17 i 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

parts of the tradition in detail, to consider 
some of the marks and signs that do indi- 
cate that a tradition or saying is really in 
touch with the events of the life of Jesus 
of Nazareth. When we coasider that our 
documents are Greek and that the original 
public for whom they were prepared were 
Greek-speaking Christians in the cities upon 
or near the shores of the Mediterranean it 
is obvious that what we are looking for 
are signs which indicate a real knowledge 
of the conditions of life in Palestine among 
the Jewish people during the first half of 
the first century a.d. These signs may 
conveniently be grouped under the heads 
of (i) Jewish Topography, (2) Jewish Lan- 
guage, (3) Jewish Thought. 

I. Jewish {and Palestinian) Topogra- 
phy. — As compared with the ignorance of 
topography displayed in most of the apocry- 
phal Acts of the Apostles, it is reassuring 
to note the general correctness of the geo- 
graphical information given in our Gospels, 
not excepting the Fourth Gospel. Most 
of the places mentioned in the Gospels can 
be identified, or are mentioned in purely 
18 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 

Jewish documents such as the Talmud. 
When we find in words ascribed to Jesus 
references to Chorazin and Capernaum/ 
towns not mentioned in the Old Testa- 
ment, though their existence is attested 
in the Talmud, we may infer that we are 
dealing with a Palestinian tradition. The 
Gospel tradition never makes Jesus have 
anything to do with the heathen and 
Greek-speaking cities of Palestine. He 
never is made to go to Cassarea. Peter's 
confession is not at Casarea Philippi : 
Jesus is with his disciples " in the villages 
of Caesarea Philippi," 2 i,e. in the native 
suburbs or districts round the new hea- 
thenish city. Tiberias, founded a.d. 26 
and afterwards the centre of Jewish life 
in Galilee, is only mentioned once and 
that incidentally ; ^ and we actually know 
from Josephus that Herod's newly built 
town was regarded at first with disfavour 
by the Jews. Of course, correctness and 
appropriateness in geographical names do 
not necessarily imply the historicity and 

^ More accurately, Capharnaum. 
* Mark yiii. 27. 8 John vi. 23 

19 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

accuracy of the stories in which they occur. 
But such things do show that the tradition 
has roots in the soil of the Holy Land. 

We must, however, distinguish this real 
geographical knowledge from a geographi- 
cal knowledge which is only the result of 
studying the Old Testament or some other 
literary source. Both kinds of knowledge 
may be notably illustrated from the writ- 
ings of Luke. St. Luke is at home in Asia 
Minor and on the sea. The narrative por- 
tion of the twentieth chapter of Acts is full 
and correct enough for a guide-book, and 
the voyage of Paul, with the shipwreck, 
reads like, what no doubt it really is, an 
account written by an eye-witness. But 
when the same author is writing of Pales- 
tine, he is merely well read, and like other 
merely well-read persons he occasionally 
falls into error. He is careful indeed of his 
language, and talks of the " Lake," not the 
" Sea," of Gennesareth ; ^ but all the 
Jews' country is often loosely called 
" Judaea " by him ^ in a way that betrays a 

^ Contrast Luke vlii. 23 ff. with Mark v. I. 
* Luke i. 5 ; iv. 44;; vii. 17. 

20 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 

foreigner's hand, while some of his state- 
ments in Luke iii. i and Acts v. 36, 37, 
seem to rest upon a careless use of Josephus. 
It is therefore unjustifiable to press Luke's 
proved accuracy with regard to the con- 
ditions of society in Asia Minor as an 
argument for the accuracy of his know- 
ledge of Palestine. 

The apocryphal Gospels show less know- 
ledge of Palestine than the canonical Four. 
This is the case even with the fragment dis- 
covered at Oxyrhynchus in 1905, which at 
first was supposed to exhibit a real ac- 
quaintance with Jerusalemite ritual and 
topography. Further investigation, how- 
ever, seems to show that the writer's ideas 
of the topography of Jerusalem were de- 
rived from the Old Testament in Greek, 
and that his ideas of Temple ritual imply 
familiarity with Egyptian rather than with 
Jewish customs.^ If that be the case, the 
sayings ascribed in the fragment to Jesus 
are more likely to represent the ideas of 
some Egyptian Christians of the second or 

1 See H. B. Swete, Zwei neue Evangelienfragtnente, in 
Lietzmann's Kleine Texte, 

21 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

third century, than to be based upon what 
Jesus really said in Palestine in the first 
century. 

2. Jewish Language. — In some of our 
documents, and notably in the Gospel ac- 
cording to Mark, we actually find words 
and sentences written down in Jewish Ara- 
maic, the vernacular of Palestine. Words 
like Abba {i.e. " My Father "), and the 
cry " Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,'' on the 
Cross, could not have been invented by 
Greek-speaking persons. They must have 
come down to us direct and unchanged 
from the living memory of the first Pales- 
tinian disciples. The solemn ^^ Amen '' at 
the beginning of our Lord's sayings, un- 
fortunately translated in English and turned 
into " Verily," is another instance of direct 
reminiscence of his manner of speech. For 
the most part these Semitic phrases tend 
to be left out in the later documents, and 
in one case a non-canonical document, the 
Gospel of Peter, has actually transmitted a 
mistranslation of the foreign word. But 
the fact that such words occur in any of 
our documents, and that they have not 

22 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 

been altogether distorted in transmission, 
is a very strong indication that such 
documents contain a historical element 
not very far removed from the actual 
events. 

Direct transliterations of Semitic words 
and phrases are, after all, a sort of historical 
luxury beyond v^hat one has a right to de- 
mand. Almost equally conclusive, if not 
quite so dramatically telling, are the Ara- 
maic idioms scattered over the Gospels, 
especially in the recorded words of Jesus. 
Take, for instance, the use of the word 
homologin^ translated " confess.'' In Mat- 
thew vii. 23 it is used merely of a solemn 
asseveration ; in Matthew x. 32, and in 
some other places, it is used most curiously 
with the preposition " in." Jesus says, 
*^ those who confess in me, I will confess in 
them," meaning that those who acknow- 
ledge that they are his disciples, he will 
acknowledge to be his disciples. This is 
mere Aramaic idiom taken over into 
Greek, showing that the saying itself must 
have been originally uttered in Aramaic, 
and that its Greek form is ax} almost literal 

23 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

translation of the original.^ It may in 
fact be said, that, if we are to regard any 
alleged saying of Jesus as genuine and his- 
torical, we must be able to put back its 
essential terms from the transmitted 
Greek into the original Aramaic. 

Equally searching are the arguments to 
be derived from the Old Testament quota- 
tions and allusions in the Gospel. If they 
depend upon the renderings of the Septua- 
gint, they are suspect ; if they be genuine, 
they will be independent of the Septua- 
gint, and will imply a direct use of the 
Hebrew original or of the Aramaic Targum. 
This is so important a point, that it may be 
worth while to explain it more fully. The 
Septuagint is the name commonly given 
to the ancient translation into Greek of 
the Hebrew Pentateuch and other Jewish 
Scriptures, made at Alexandria in the time 
of the Ptolemies. This version had be- 
come the Bible of the Greek-speaking 
Jews in New Testament times, and from 
them it passed over to the Christians. In 

^ It is curious that the idiom does not appear in Greek 
with the verb for ** deny." 

24 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 

essentials, apart from corruptions of text 
and certain substitutions in the less-read 
books, it became the Bible of the Church, 
and it is the Bible of the Greek Church 
still. It was therefore through the 
Septuagint, and through the Septuagint 
alone, that the Bible was known to 
Christians during the second century and 
the latter part of the first century, i.e. 
during the time that our Gospels assumed 
their final shape and became canonical. 
The original Hebrew was a sealed book 
to them after the Church had definitely 
separated from the Synagogue, i.e. ever 
since the great catastrophe of 70 a.d. A 
man like St. Paul could use the Scriptures 
both in Hebrew and in Greek. He had 
had some regular Rabbinical training, and 
he quotes the Bible like a modern English 
scholar who can read his Greek Testament 
and who gives sometimes the renderings 
of the ordinary English version, some- 
times his own renderings direct from the 
original. But our Lord and his first 
disciples spoke Aramaic ; there is nothing 
to suggest that they were acquainted with 

25 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

the current Greek version. In the Syna- 
gogues they would hear the Scriptures read 
in the original Hebrew, followed by a 
more or less stereotyped rendering into 
the Aramaic of Palestine, the language of 
the country, itself a cousin of Hebrew. 
A faithfully reported saying therefore of 
Jesus or of Peter ought to agree with the 
Hebrew against the Greek, or at least 
ought not to acquire its point and appro- 
priateness from a peculiar rendering in 
the Greek. 

A couple of examples will illustrate 
what has been said. The Gospel of Mat- 
thew alone records the circumstance that 
Jesus used to quote the word of the Lord 
by Hosea, " I desire mercy and not sacri- 
fice.''^ It is a point in favour of the 
authenticity of the saying that it agrees 
with the Hebrew text against the Greek 
translation of the Prophets, which had 
" I desire mercy rather than sacrifice.'' At 
least, it shews us that the tradition about 
this saying of Jesus goes back to a Pales- 
tinian source. We may take as a contrast 

^ Hosea vi. 6« 

26 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 

the story told in Matthew xxi. i6, and there 
only, that when the boys were crying out 
" Hosanna '' in the Temple, and the 
Chief Priests were vexed, Jesus replied, 
^' Have ye never read, ' Out of the mouth 
of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected 
praise ? ' '' Here the whole point of the 
saying is in the word '^ praise,'' but it is a 
word that does not occur in the original 
Hebrew at all. In the Hebrew of Psalm 
viii. 2 we find, '^ Thou hast ordained 
strength " ; it is only in the not very ac- 
curate Greek translation of the Psalms that 
" praise " occurs. The story therefore 
has evidently at least been recast by some 
one who used the Old Testament in Greek, 
and we must consider it improbable that 
Jesus really quoted this verse from the 
Psalms in the circumstances alleged. 

Both the above instances are taken from 
the Gospel according to Matthew. The 
compiler of that Gospel gives the quota- 
tions from the Old Testament which he 
makes in his own person sometimes direct 
from the Hebrew, sometimes according to 
the current Greek translation. Like Paul 
27 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

of Tarsus, he illustrates in himself the 
transplantation of the Christian movement 
from the Semitic soil in which it germi- 
nated into the Graeco-Roman civilisation. 
Luke, on the other hand, always uses the 
Septuagint in his own quotations and allu- 
sions to the Old Testament. Whether he 
was able to understand any Semitic lan- 
guage is of course unknown to us ; but his 
acquaintance with the Bible is certainly 
derived from the Greek. We cannot, 
therefore, believe that he gives us the 
actual words used by Jesus in the Syna- 
gogue at Nazareth ; ^ for the passages there 
quoted from Isaiah Ixi. i ff . and Iviii. 6 are 
taken from the Septuagint. But the quo- 
tation from Isaiah liii. 12, at the end of the 
sayings given in Luke xxii. 35-37, sayings 
which on general grounds appear to have 
the ring of genuineness, does not agree in 
diction with the Septuagint and does agree 
with the Hebrew. Here, therefore, we 
have an instance of faithful reminiscence 
of our Lord's words. 

3. Jewish thought. — Properly to dis- 
1 Luke iv. 18 ff. 
28 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 

cuss the Jewish thought expressed and pre- 
supposed in the Gospels would be to write 
a full commentary on them. For our im- 
mediate purpose it will be sufficient to 
point out that hardly any other kind of 
thought is presupposed. There is no 
doubt a certain amount of thought and 
philosophy which is ultimately Greek, 
whatever be its immediate origin, pre- 
supposed in the Fourth Gospel. In the 
Nativity Stories, also, some critics have 
seen Greek notions underlying the narra- 
tive. But it is the obvious fact that in 
the rest of the Gospels the Greek influence, 
so far as the thought and mental atmo- 
sphere of the subject-matter are concerned, 
is simply non-existent. Apart from ques- 
tions of language and purely literary criti- 
cism, the three Synoptic Gospels might be 
translations from the Aramaic. The main 
ideas of the Synoptic Gospels, the funda- 
mental phrases round which move the 
thoughts belonging to the Gospel, all have 
their explanation and illustration from 
contemporary Judaism. The Kingdom 
of God, the Christ or Messiah, the Day of 

2Q 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

Judgment, treasure in heaven, Abraham's 
bosom, — all these are Jewish ideas, entirely 
foreign to the native thought of the 
Graeco-Roman world. We hear nothing 
in the Gospels about the Immortality of 
the Soul, much about the Resurrection 
at the last day ; nothing about " Virtue,'' 
much about " Righteousness," little about 
Purification, much about the Forgiveness 
of Sin. Even the polemic against hea- 
thenism is absent. 

To such an extent are the Synoptic Gos- 
pels Jewish books, occupied with problems 
belonging originally to first-century Juda- 
ism, that it makes large parts of them diffi- 
cult to use as books of universal religion. 
But it is just this Jewish character that 
gives them their value as historical docu- 
ments. " Lo ! the Kingdom of God is in 
your midst ! " said Jesus once. The Oxy- 
rhynchus " Sayings of Jesus," representing 
a development of Christianity among the 
Greek-speaking townsfolk of Egypt, com- 
bines this phrase with the old Greek Del- 
phic precept " Know thyself ! " If the say- 
ing had been transmitted to us only in this 

30 



PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 

connexion, we might well hesitate to re- 
ceive it as a genuine utterance of Jesus 
of Nazareth. But the canonical Gospel 
of Luke joins it with the announcement of 
the unexpected advent of the Kingdom of 
God, which would come before those who 
were unprepared were aware. This has a 
claim, an excellent claim, to be accepted 
as a historical representation of the teach- 
mg of Jesus ; the occurrence in such a con- 
text of the saying about the Kingdom of 
God appearing in the midst is a strong rea- 
son for regarding it as genuine and tells us 
its historical interpretation. On the other 
hand, the Oxyrhynchus document gives us 
only an application of our Lord's words to 
changed conditions of time and place. 



3^ 



II 

THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 

When we study the Gospels together, it 
is at once obvious that the Fourth Gospel, 
the Gospel according to John, stands apart 
from the others. For the most part the 
narratives and discourses which it contains 
are not found in the other three Gospels, 
while the matter contained in these is not 
found in the fourth. But the three Gos- 
pels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke have 
much in common. It is possible to ar- 
range them in parallel columns, so that 
their common matter may be studied and 
compared at a glance. This was first done 
in a systematic way about a hundred years 
ago by J. J. Griesbach, who called this 
arrangement in parallel columns a Synop- 
sis. From the time of Griesbach the Gos- 
pels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke have 

3^ 



THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 

been called the Synoptic Gospels, and the 
problem of the relation of Matthew, Mark, 
and Luke to one another is the Synoptic 
Problem. 

A century of investigation has brought 
the Gospel according to Mark into a gene- 
rally acknowledged position of priority as 
A historical source. This has been effected 
Almost entirely by internal considerations, \ 
by examining the common matter of Mat-^ 
thew, Mark, and Luke, comparing the par- 
allel narratives as wholes and in detail, and 
by estimating the nature and significance 
of the peculiar characteristics of each of 
the three. External evidence, the testi- 
mony of ancient writers, is so scanty and 
obscure that little of direct value can be 
extracted from it. By about i8o a.d. we- 
find our four Gospels already received in the 
church as a sacred and exclusive collection. 
This collection seems to have been already 
formed by the middle of the second 
century. Before that the several Gos- 
pels must have circulated independently^ 
The Third Gospel, in fact, was designed by 
the writer of it to be the first volume of a 

33 c 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

longer historical work, of which our Acts 
of the Apostles forms the second. The 
Second Gospel is mutilated at the end ; 
its text, according to the oldest manu- 
scripts in Greek and the oldest Syriac ver- 
sion, ends at xvi. 8, in the middle of a 
sentence. This mutilation must have been 
accidental, for any intentional curtail- 
ment would have been made at a more 
suitable point : even xvi. 7 would have 
made a better finish. Therefore we may 
infer that all our copies of Mark are des- 
cended from a single copy, imperfect at 
the end and perhaps tattered elsewhere. 
As a matter of fact, there are one or two 
places in Mark, e.g. incomprehensible pro- 
per names like Boanerges emd Dalmanutha,'^ 
where the transmitted text can best be 
explained as the result of attempts to copy 
an illegible exemplar. But such places are 
few. On the whole, the text is satisfactory 
in essentials; apart from the minor 
stylistic and harmonistic changes of 
scribes, we seem to have the work very 
much as it left the author's hand. 

^ On Dalmanutha^seQ Jmer, J, of Theology^ xv, p. 174. 

34 



THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 

" Mark was known to the two other syn- 
optic writers, when it was already in the 
same condition as we now have it, both in 
text and contents.'' So writes Wellhausen.^ 
This is the result of the critical study of 
the Synoptic Gospels during the nine- 
teenth century. Now that this result has 
been attained, it is easy to verify in its main 
outlines by any one who will compare for 
himself the common matter of Matthew, 
Mark, and Luke. It is possible to explain 
all, or almost all, the features of the Gos- 
pel narrative as we read it in Matthew and 
Luke on the supposition that it is based 
upon Mark, impossible to explain Mark 
on the supposition that it is based on a 
document similar to Matthew or Luke. 
The common order of the anecdotes is 
Mark's order ; where Matthew deserts 
Mark's order, Mark is supported by Luke, 
where Luke deserts Mark's order, Mark is 
supported by Matthew. Matthew and 
Luke never agree in order against Mark. 
It is practically the same with the text 
itself as with the order of the narratives : 
* Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelietiy § 6, p. 57. 

35 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

Mark and Luke agree against Matthew, 
Matthew and Mark agree against Luke, 
while the points in which Matthew and 
Luke agree against Mark are so few and so 
insignificant in character that it seems 
unnecessary to postulate the existence of an 
earlier form of Mark — what used to be 
called in Germany Ur-Marcus^ i.e. origi- 
nal Mark — in order to account for them.^ 
But the demonstration of the relative 
priority of the Gospel according to Mark is 
only the first step in the criticism of the 
Synoptic Gospels. Mark may be older 
than Matthew or Luke, and may constitute 
one of the sources from which they were 
compiled. We must go on to consider the 
Gospel of Mark in itself as a historical docu- 
ment, and also to investigate the source 
and character of those large portions of 
Matthew and Luke that have no parallel in 
Mark, or at least cannot have been taken 
directly from Mark. We may admit that 
Matthew and Luke used Mark practically 

^ See the discussion in the present writer's Gospel 
History and its Transmission, pp. 42-58, and also Sir John 
Hawkins' Horae Synopiicae, 172 ff. (2nd ed., 208 ff.). 

36 



THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 

in the form which still survives, but was 
that the original form ? Is the Gospel 
of Mark itself perhaps based on an 
earlier document ? And can we trace in 
Matthew and Luke the use of any other 
document besides Mark ? 

It will be convenient to say a few words^ 
about the last question at this point. The ^' 
Gospels of Matthew and Luke mainly differ 
from that of Mark in that they contain a 
large number of sayings of Jesus not given i 
by Mark. Many of these sayings arepecu-"^ 
liar to Matthew or peculiar to Luke, but 
others are given in both, and often with 
such coincidences of language and of order 
that they must have been derived from a 
common source. Thus, for instance, Mat- 
thew v.-vii. (the so-called " Sermon on the 
Mount ") is parallel to Luke vi. 20-49, and 
Matthew xi. 2-19 is practically repeated in 
Luke vii. 18-35. ^ comparison of these^ 
passages leads us to infer that Matthew and 
Luke have made use of a common source, 
written in Greek, which must have con- 
tained, amongst other things, sayings of 
Jesus about John the Baptist, together 

37 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

with a collection of ethical sayings which 
began with the Beatitudes and ended 
with the similitude of the houses built on / 
the rock or on the river-bed. The com- ' 
mon source, now lost, except so far as it is 
preserved in Matthew and Luke, it was 
formerly the fashion to call the " Logia," 
from a belief that it was mentioned under 
that name by Papias of Hierapolis in Asia 
Minor about the middle of the second cen- 
tury.^' Wellhausen and others, however, 
call it " Q," i.e. Quelle (source), and this 
name is preferable, as we know so little of 
its origin or extent. \^ 

The common matter of Matthew and ' 
Luke, not shared by Mark, almost all con- 
sists of sayings of Jesus. We therefore^^ 
assume that Q mainly consisted of sayings. 
But the same arguments that prove Q 
to have contained the ^^ Sermon on the 

1 Papias (quoted by Eusebius, Ch. History, iii. 39) 
says : " Matthew indeed in the Hebrew language wrote 
down the Logia, and each interpreted them as he was 
able." What the work was to which Papias alludes is 
very doubtful : it is certain that our Gospel according 
to Matthew is a Greek work, based upon Greek sources, 
one of them being in fact our Gospel according to Mark. 

38 



THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 

Mount," or at least an earlier form of that 
collection of sayings, also prove Q to have 
contained the story of the healing of the 
centurion's boy. It is because Matthew 
(v. 3-vii. 27) and Luke (vi. 20-49) each 
contains a collection of sayings, beginning 
with beatitudes and ending with the simili- 
tude of the House on the Rock, that we 
infer a similar collection to have existed in 
Q. But this collection is followed, both in 
Matthew (viii. 3-13) and in Luke (vii. 
i~io), by the story of the centurion. If 
our first inference be valid, then the story 
of the centurion must also be assigned to 
Q. Q therefore was not a mere assembly 
of sayings of Jesus, but also contained anec- 
dotes about his wonderful works. 

But when we have said this, we have 
said nearly everything that is absolutely 
certain. Professor Harnack in his book, 
" Sayings and Discourses of Jesus,'' ^ has 
attempted to reconstruct Q from the 
sections of Matthew and Luke which he 
considers to have been derived from this 
lost document. But it is very doubtful 
^ Harnack, Sf ruche und Reden JesUy 1907. 

39 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

whether his reconstruction can be accepted 
as anything more than a mass of genuine 
but detached fragments, and what we want 
is a picture of Q as a whole. We may agree 
that the sayings and discourses which 
Harnack assigns to Q really did form part 
of it, but we have very little reason to 
think that Q did not contain a great deal 
more. 

One thing at least is clear. We can see 
by a comparison of Matthew and Luke 
with Mark that Matthew and Luke have 
used Mark, making it in fact the basis 
upon which their own Gospels have been 
planned. Between them they have managed 
to incorporate almost all the Gospel of 
Mark, and by comparing their works with 
the original, we can see pretty well the rea- 
sons which led them to drop or to modify 
those portions of Mark which they have 
severally dropped or modified. But we 
are able to see all this, because the Gospel of 
Mark is actually before us. If the Gospel 
of Mark were unknown to us, if its con- 
tents had to be inferred from Matthew and 
Luke, should we be able to reconstruct it 
40 



THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 

at all ? I do not think so. Even if by 
divination, rather than hy legitimate criti- 
cism, we recognised as Marcan those sec- 
tions which are retained only by Matthew 
or only by Luke, we should still miss all the 
vivid peculiarities of Mark. And when we 
are trying to estimate the tendencies and 
characteristics of the Gospel of Mark, it is 
just by the peculiarities of the work that 
its characteristics are revealed. If we were 
reconstructing Mark by the same process 
and with the same materials that we use 
for reconstructing Q, that is to say, by 
picking out the Marcan elements from 
Matthew and Luke, we should not arrive 
at a document in which our Lord says, 
" The Sabbath was made for man, and not 
man for the Sabbath," or one that tells us 
how his friends once thought he was mad, 
for these things are preserved neither by 
Matthew nor by Luke. We should not 
have any idea that the real Mark contained 
the parable of the ear of corn growing of it- 
self. We should not know that it contained 
the Aramaic sayings, Talitha cumiy and 
Efhphatha^ sayings which carry us back 

41 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

to the soil of Palestine. We could not have 
reconstructed out of Matthew and Luke 
the important historical notice that Jesus 
when he for the last time passed through 
Galilee *^ would not that any man should 
know it," or that he began his answer 
about the great commandment with the 
" Hear, O Israel ! " All these things are 
features really characteristic of Mark ; it is 
the presence of strongly individual features 
such as these in the Gospel of Mark that 
gives it its pre-eminence as a historical 
document. But not one of them would 
be found in a Mark reconstructed out of 
Matthew and Luke, and I cannot believe 
that our reconstructions of Q are any more 
like the real Q than our reconstructions of 
Mark would be like the real Mark.^ 

Another point also has to be taken into 
consideration. If the Gospel of Mark were 
not extant, and we had to infer its scope 
and contents from the Gospels of Matthew 
and Luke alone, is it not almost inevitable 

^ See Harnack's Sfruche und Reden Jesu (1907), and the 
present writer's review of it in the Journal of Theokgtcal 
Studies^ viii. 454-459. 

42 



THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 

that we should have assigned to Mark some 
things that we now know to belong not to 
Mark but to Q ? We do not know for 
certain that Matthew and Luke used only- 
one common source besides Mark, and it 
remains possible that the mass of material 
which we regard as belonging to Q may 
have been drawn from at least two separate 
sources. It is conceivable, for instance, 
that the sayings of Jesus which relate to 
John the Baptist, together with the ac- 
count of the Baptist's preaching, may have 
been derived from a document different 
from that which supplied the outline of 
the " Sermon on the Mount '' and the 
Parables. I do not think it on the w^hole 
probable, but there is something to be said 
for it, and it is a possibility to be borne in 
mind. 

What, then, it may be asked, do we gain 
by the recognition of this lost source Q, if 
we cannot reconstruct it ? The answer, 
I believe, is this : that by recognising cer- 
tain sayings in Matthew and Luke to have 
been drawn from the same source, we are 
better able to isolate the features in the 

43 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

sayings that are due to the several Evange- 
lists, and thereby better able to understand 
what they meant in their original form. 
We cannot do without either the Lucan or 
the Matthaean form of the sayings, but we 
can use the one to control the other. 

In any case, the material comprehended 
under the sign Q includes very many of the 
most precious jewels of the Gospel. When 
Justin Martyr in the second century wished 
to exhibit to the heathen Emperor the 
characteristic ethical teaching of Christ, 
nine-tenths of his examples came out of 
passages derived from Q.^ It is from Q 
that we have the blessing on the poor, the 
hungry, the reviled ; from Q come " Love 
your enemies," " Turn the other cheek," 
"Be like your Father who maketh His sun 
to shine on the evil and the good," " Con- 
sider the lilies," " Be not anxious — ^your 
Father knoweth ye have need," " They 
shall come from east and west and sit down 
with Abraham in the kingdom of God." 
It is Q that tells us that the adversaries of 
Jesus found him not ascetic enough and 

* Justin Martyr, Jfology, i. 15 f 

44 



THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 

mocked at him as a friend of tax-gatherers 
and sinners. It is Q that tells us that Jesus 
said " I thank thee. Father, that thou hast 
hidden these things from the wise and re- 
vealed them to babes, — even so. Father, 
for so it was pleasing in thy sight." If the 
work of Mark be more important to the 
historian, it is Q that supplies starting- 
points for the Christian moralist. Most 
important of all, it gives light and shade to 
the somewhat austere lines of the portrait 
of Jesus sketched in the Gospel of Mark. 

The interest of Q is extremely great. It 
is great from what we actually know of it, 
and it possesses the fascination of the elu- 
sive and the unknown. It is well therefore 
to keep steadily in mind how little we can be 
certain even of the general plan of the work, 
or of what it did not contain. True it is, 
that, as Justin says, " short and concise came 
words from Christ, for he was no sophist, 
but his word was a mighty work of God '^ 
detached as the fragments of Q must remain 
to us, often devoid of context or presuppos- 
ing totally different social conditions from 
those of our own age, yet the single sayings 

45 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

have again and again proved themselves 
instinct with truly divine power. Yet 
though they are jewels, they are for the 
most part jewels detached from their origin 
nal setting, and this setting we cannot re- 
construct as a whole. I am persuaded that 
Q is to us, and must remain, a collection 
of disconnected fragments. 



46 



Ill 

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

The question most in debate at present 
in the criticism of the Gospel history is 
whether the Gospel according to Mark 
gives us a generally faithful representation 
of the ministry of Jesus. On grounds 
mainly of literary criticism it is acknow- 
ledged that our Mark was used as a basis by 
the other synoptists. The Gospel of Mark 
is therefore more primitive as a whole 
than the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as 
wholes. But is Mark to be regarded as 
absolutely primitive ? And even if we 
regard the analysis of Mark into its com- 
ponent factors as for us an insoluble pro- 
blem, even if we regard all theories of an 
Ur-Marcus as baseless guesses, still there re- 
mains the inevitable question of the value 
of our Gospel of Mark as a historical source. 

47 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

At best it is a mere sketch of the career of 
Jesus Christ : but is it, we must ask, a trust- 
worthy sketch ? 

The answer given by modern investiga- 
tors to this most important question de- 
pends in the last resort upon the view that 
each one forms of the real work undertaken 
and accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth. 
Undoubtedly there are many, coming from 
very different philosophical and theological 
camps, to whom the Gospel according to 
Mark appears to be an inadequate interpre- 
tation of our Lord. It does not satisfy 
the modern philosophical liberal, who 
would like to regard the mission of Jesus 
as " purely religio-ethical and humani- 
tarian." ^ The philosophical liberal finds 
fewer moral maxims in Mark than in Mat- 
thew and Luke, while at the same time he 
is shocked by the description of a number 
of miracles, — mostly, it is true, of healing, 
— the details of which he feels himself 
obliged to explain away. But the picture 
drawn in Mark is hardly more satisfactory 
from the orthodox conservative point of 
^ B. W Bacon, Beginnings of Gospel Story, p. xxxviii. 

48 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

view. In Wellhausen's phrase, " we hear 
of Disciples and we wonder how He 
comes to have them." ^ Till our eyes 
become accustomed to the atmosphere it 
is difficult to recognise the conventional 
Saviour, with the gentle unindividualised 
face, in the stormy and mysterious Per- 
sonage portrayed by the second Gospel. 
" And they were in the way, going up to 
Jerusalem, and Jesus was going before 
them, and they were amazed, and some as 
they followed were afraid " ^ — as we read 
the story in Mark we follow Jesus on his 
way, and we hardly know why or whither. 
At least, we hardly know what is being 
told us, if we listen with modern pre- 
suppositions, instead of coming with our 
minds full of the Jewish expectations of 
the Kingdom of God, as they took shape 
during the turbulent two centuries that 
preceded the crucifixion of Jesus. 

The ultimate difficulty felt by so many 
modern critics about the Gospel of Mark 
is not the minor discrepancies in the narra- 
tive, though they are present, or the tales 
^ Einleitung^ p. 51 ^ Mark x 32. 

49 » 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

of miracle, for it is always possible to allow 
for unscientific description or exaggeration. 
The difficulty lies in its presentation of the 
actual contents of the " Gospel " itself and 
of the career of Jesus. According to these 
critics, Mark has not only put in features 
of the Ministry that he might have left out, 
he has left out things, and those the most 
important, that he ought to have put in. 
Where, they say, is the Teaching of Jesus ? 
Mark gives us neither the Sermon on the 
Mount nor the Parable of the Prodigal Son. 
One who considers that Mark used Q con- 
fesses that the use made of it is " by no 
means characterised by sympathetic and 
appreciative insight.''^ And if, as tra- 
dition seems to assert, the ultimate source 
of the Evangelist's information be St. 
Peter himself, is it possible to suppose 
that the real characteristics of our Lord's 
career could have been thrown so com- 
pletely out of focus ? 

It may readily be granted that most of 

^ Bacon, Beginnings^ p. xx. That such a judgment 
has to be passed upon Mark's use of Q is an argument for 
disbelieving that Mark knew Q at all. 

50 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

these objections are weighty, if only we can 
be sure of the foundation upon which they 
rest. But it is the foundation itself that is 
insecure. The objections all assume that 
Jesus was really and primarily an ethical 
teacher, or a social reformer, or both. 
Now, if we regard Jesus from this point of 
view, it is true that many features in the 
Gospel of Mark can hardly be treated as 
historically accurate. The very ground 
plan of the work becomes incredible. It 
becomes impossible to comprehend or to 
justify the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem, or 
to obtain an intelligible picture of his 
doings and sayings when he arrived there. 
Both from the liberals and from the con- 
servatives we hear that the Paschal week 
is too short a period for " the Jerusalem 
ministry." If the object of Jesus in going 
to Jerusalem was to teach there, then the 
time allowed by Mark is insufficient. If his 
object were " a program of peaceful reform 
in the interest of the masses,'' ^ we can only 
say that it was eminently unsuccessful. 
And if his object in going to Jerusalem 

^ Bacon, Beginnings, p. 158 

51 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

was, as Mark seems to tell us, simply 
to be killed, is not that irrational, the 
act of a fanatic ? Was it worthy of the 
founder of the religion of the civilised 
world ? 

It is perhaps not out of place to remind 
ourselves that this is not the first time the 
Way of the Cross has been accounted fool- 
ishness both by philosophers and by tradi- 
tionalists ; for the doctrine set forth by 
Mark is the Doctrine of the Cross. To 
such an extent is this the case that the 
Evangelist is commonly supposed in criti- 
cal theories to have derived his conception 
of Christ's work from St. Paul. To quote 
Professor Bacon once more : " The Pau- 
linism of Mark is supremely manifest in 
this evangelist's whole conception of what 
constitutes the apostolic message " ; it is 
" the continual reiteration of the doctrine, 
' He that would save his life shall lose it.' " ^ 
Of course this is Paulinism ; but what if 
Paulinism in this respect was really " the 
mind of Christ " ? 

Once more it may be well to point out 

* Beginnings, pp. xxvii., xxviii, 

52 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

the very peculiar position occupied by the 
Gospel of Mark in the history of early 
Christian literature, for it is this peculiar 
position that compels us to weigh with the 
utmost care and deference the story that 
it offers to us. On the one hand there is 
nothing in Christian literature to indicate 
that the Gospel of Mark was ever popular 
or official, or that it was written to suit the 
taste of any community that has left any 
trace in history. Irenaeus says somewhere 
that Mark was used by the Docetic heretics ; 
but he brings forward no evidence in sup- 
port of his statement, which seems a mere 
theory made to correspond with the use 
of Luke by the Marcionites and of 
Matthew by the Ebionites. If existing 
evidence be any reflex of actual use, the 
Gospel of Mark was, and has been till the 
present day, unpopular and neglected. It 
is, in fact, more or less of a puzzle how it 
came to be included in the Church's 
Canon. It is written in an uncultivated 
style, and it occupies itself with those parts 
and aspects of the Gospel story concerning 
which Greek-speaking Christians seem to 

53 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

have taken very little interest, until the rise 
of the cult of the Holy Places in Palestine 
toward the very end of the second century 
A.D. I find it difficult to believe that a book 
of this kind is the work of an eclectic, who 
combined Pauline doctrine with Petrine 
traditions and wove them together into a 
strange and rough, yet vigorous tale. 
Moreover — and this is the discovery of 
modern literary criticism — this unpopular 
Gospel was indeed used by one class of per- 
sons, viz. those who after Mark attempted 
to tell the story of Jesus Christ. St. Luke 
informs us in his preface that '' many," 
before he himself wrote, had taken in hand 
to draw up some account of Christian 
origins ; but however many there may 
have been, he uses the Gospel of Mark for 
one of the main sources of his own work. 
The Gospel according to Matthew to a 
still greater degree is based upon Mark. 
It seems almost as if these writers had been 
compelled to use a writing which no one 
else cared to quote. 

Surely the natural inference to be drawn 
is that the point of view from which Mark 

54 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

had written was already antiquated when 
the later synoptic Evangelists made their 
compilations. The Gospel of Mark may 
perhaps be the work of a less cultivated 
mind than that of the other Gospel writers ; 
at any rate it comes before us as a docu- 
ment belonging to an earlier stage in the 
development of Christian ideas than the 
other Gospels. If then we find it animated 
by ideas which do occur in Paul, though 
during the second century they find hardly 
any echo in orthodox Christian literature, 
some part of the resemblance may be due 
to its primitive age and character. In any 
case, it is our plain duty to weigh well 
the story told in this venerable docu- 
ment, before we reject it in favour of 
modern reconstructions of the course of 
events. 

Naturally we need not expect any im- 
possible standard of accuracy or insight. 
The question at issue is not of the presen- 
tation of details, but of the general view. 
It is not claimed that the second Evange- 
list was by nature or by training a specially 
gifted historian, but he was too much in 

55 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

touch with the events to give a wholly- 
distorted account of them. The writer of 
the Fourth Gospel may perhaps have a 
claim to be heard as an interpreter of Jesus 
Christ : the office of Mark is rather to be 
a witness of what men saw and heard. 



The Kingdom of God and the 
" Son of Man " 

What, then, is the general conception of 
the mission of Jesus set before us in the 
Gospel of Mark ? We may begin with two 
or three quotations from Professor Bacon, 
who is all the better witness as he is a 
convinced opponent of apocalyptic escha- 
tology. He speaks of ^^ the sane and well- 
poised mind of the plain mechanic of Naza- 
reth,'' and regards the apocalyptic elements 
in the Gospels as later additions made by 
" the enthusiastic Church.'' ^ Yet even 
Professor Bacon says, and says most justly : 
" For some reason Jesus did go up to Jeru- 
1 Bacon, Beginnings, p. io8. 

56 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

salem, and throw down the gauntlet in the 
face of the priestly hierocracy in the tem- 
ple itself. For some reason he did follow 
a r61e that led to his execution by Pilate 
as a political agitator. For some reason 
his followers, very shortly after, did ascribe 
to him not mere reappearance from the 
tomb, but exaltation to the place of the 
Messiah ^ at the right hand of God ' — 
attributes so exalted that it is difficult to 
believe they had no other foundation than 
mere reverence for an admired Teacher.'' ^ 
And again (on Mark ix. i) : " We cannot 
do honest justice to the unbroken consensus 
of primitive testimony without acknow- 
ledging that Jesus pointed his disciples to 
the expected intervention of God, which 
should be the vindication of his gospel, 
before the generation which heard and 
rejected it should have passed away." ^ 
This is well and justly said ; but does it 
not show that formulas like " the sane and 
well-poised mind of the plain mechanic of 
Nazareth'' are inadequate, if not alto- 
gether inappropriate, as a characterisation 
^ Beginnings, p. io6. ^ Ibid p. 120. 

57 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

of Jesus ? If we rationalise overmuch the 
ideas and the hopes of Jesus and his friends, 
how are we to account for their invincible 
enthusiasm ? 

^' The vindication of his gospel '' — ^but 
what was the Gospel of Jesus ? Accord- 
ing to Mark it consisted in the announce- 
ment that the Kingdom of God was at 
hand.^ Everything else was inference 
and deduction from this fundamental 
idea. 

The Kingdom of God is indeed familiar 
to us as a religious phrase, but the concep- 
tion itself is strange, because at this period 
of the world's history no one but the social- 
ists are expecting a great change, and that 
a change for the better, in the conditions 
of human life. It was otherwise with the 
Jewish nation in the first century of our 
era. For two hundred years, ever since 
the martyrs in the days before the Macca- 
bees, the martyrs who had preferred to die 
rather than give up the customs of their 
inherited religion, the struggle between 
Judaism and civilisation had gone on 

1 Mark i. 15. 

58 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

The military successes of Judas Macca- 
baeus and his family secured to all the Jews 
the undisturbed exercise of their religion, 
and the outward history of Palestine 
degenerated into an entirely secular and 
somewhat sordid game of politics, with the 
irresistible might of Rome looming ever 
more insistently in the background. But 
this was only one side of the great duel. 
It was a war of ideas, a war between civili- 
sation and religion, in the modern sense 
of these terms. On the side of the Gen- 
tiles was philosophy, science, art, good 
government, all the material goods of this 
life ; on the side of the Jew v/as the in- 
eradicable conviction that the Lord and 
Maker of all things visible and invisible 
had chosen Israel and taught it the way of 
Life and Death, and that in comparison 
with this all other privileges and advan- 
tages were as nothing. Judaism was a 
conscious rival to civilisation, as civilisa- 
tion was then understood. That the 
* Gentiles ' were aware of this we can 
see from the references to the Jews in 
contemporary classical literature, where 

59 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

they are represented as a strange unnatural 
race, distinct from other human beings. 

Such a condition of things does not en- 
dure for long. An isolated race cannot 
permanently maintain its ideals in the face 
of the civilised world. In the political 
sphere the end came in a.d. 70, when, the 
Jews having at last broken out into open re- 
bellion against the Gentile yoke, the Jew- 
ish State was destroyed and the Temple 
worship abolished. The Judaism that sur- 
vived, and survives to this day, is really 
rather a posthumous child of the older 
Judaism than the older Judaism itself. It 
is rather to be regarded as the younger 
sister of Christianity than its mother. 
The older Judaism perished, but its 
children survived. 

During the long struggle with the world 
outside, the hopes of the Jews expressed 
themselves in forms very different from 
what actually came to pass. These hopes 
find expression in the long series of apoca- 
lyptic books that appeared at intervals 
throughout the whole period, from the 
Book of Daniel in 168 B.C., just before the 
60 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

Maccabaean rising, to the Apocalypse of 
Baruch, written after the Destruction of 
Jerusalem by Titus ; and it is from these 
books we can trace the rise and develop- 
ment of that belief in the coming Kingdom 
of God which is assumed in the New Testa- 
ment. The books are now, with the excep- 
tion of the Book of Daniel, rejected both 
by the Rabbinical Jews and by nearly all 
Christian bodies ; for when the New 
Age came, the imperfect forecasts of it 
lost their interest. Rabbinical Judaism 
rejected the hopes which belonged to a 
time when the Jews were still a nation, 
and the Christian Church gradually came 
to do the same, although the Church 
was in a special sense the heir of the 
Apocalyptists. 

The main idea of the Kingdom of God 
is found already in the Book of Daniel. 
The fundamental notion is that the Most 
High is indeed Autocrat, He alone has 
sovereignty, but He hands it over for a 
time and for His own inscrutable purposes 
to whomsoever He will.^ At any given 

^ Daniel iv. 17 

61 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

moment there is a world-power, the Baby- 
lonian, the " Median," the Persian, the 
Seleucid Greek. But this will not be for 
ever. In the end the Most High Him- 
self will take the dominion into His own 
hands. The Kingdom of God Himself 
will be inaugurated, and He will reign 
for ever, protecting His faithful people 
and rewarding them for all the trials 
they have undergone at the hands of the 
heathen. 

This is the apocalyptic hope. It is 
the correlative of the conflict between 
Jewish religion and the Graeco-Roman 
civilisation. To do it justice, we must 
remember that this conflict to the Jews 
was one between religious faith and ma- 
terial civilisation : if the Kingdom of 
God were to come at all, it would come 
not by material weapons but by the 
operation of God. Material force was 
on the other side. And so the Christian 
is taught to pray " Thy Kingdom 
come,'' because it is for God, not for 
man, to bring it in. When the time is 
ripe, it will come. 

6z 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

The Christ or Messiah, that is, the 
Anointed of God, is one of the features of 
the coming Kingdom. His function is to 
judge the heathen and to rule as God's 
Vicegerent over the Saints, when the Great 
Day arrives. The Christ does not bring in 
the Kingdom, — that is the work of God 
Himself ; the Christ only enters on his 
office when all is ready. He is, in fact, 
one of the personages of the New Age, not 
the person through whom the New Age is 
brought in. If he be conceived of as exist- 
ing beforehand, then he is not yet properly 
the Christ. It is most important to keep 
this in mind when we read the Gospels, as 
otherwise the command of Jesus that Peter 
should be silent about his Messiahship 
becomes incomprehensible. Before the 
time Jesus may be Messiah in God's 
sight, to whom to think is to do.^ He 
may be Messiah to the demons, but 
to men He is not yet Messiah. It was 
for God to make Him manifest, not for 
men. 

Was there then any Scripture that had 

* Enoch xiv. 22. 

63 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

spoken of the Messiah before he became 
Messiah ? And if so, by what title had 
he been spoken of ? The answer is, that 
he was the Man from Heaven spoken of by 
Enoch. 

Here we come to the closely allied ques- 
tions of the influence of the Book of Enoch 
upon primitive Christianity, and of the 
meaning of the title " Son of Man/' The 
Son of Man — as curious a phrase in Greek 
as in English — is a literal translation of the 
Aramaic for ^' the human being,'* " the 
Man." It io evident that no one could 
take " the Man " as a title for himself or 
his office without something further being 
understood. If any one calls himself 
" the Man,'' it must mean " the Man 
— ^you know who." When therefore 
Jesus speaks of himself as "the Son 
of Man," a phrase in Aramaic identical 
with " the Man," he must mean " the 
Man — you know whom I speak of." 
And when we notice that this Man is one 
who " comes with the clouds of heaven," 
with whom is associated functions of judg- 
ment at the great Assize, it is clear that the 

64 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

Man who is meant is the celestial Man of 
Daniel vii. 13, a symbolical figure that 
stands for the Kingdom of the Saints, in 
contrast to the bestial figures that come up 
from the sea, which symbolise the heathen 
empires. 

In Daniel the Man is not individualised. 
He stands for the nation, not for the Mes- 
siah. But in the Similitudes of Enoch, the 
Son of Man who was with the Ancient of 
Days ^ is taken from Daniel and personified 
and individualised. From of old this Son 
of Man, this celestial human being, has been 
hidden with the Most High,^ but one day 
he will be revealed. The kings and the 
mighty, i.e. the heathen rulers of the 
world, will see and be terrified and beg for 
mercy in vain. The angels will drag them 
away to punishment, but the righteous 
will be saved and protected, and with that 
Son of Man they will rejoice for ever and 
ever.^ 

The Book of Enoch is a strange barba- 
rous work, without poetry, without charm. 

1 Enoch xlvi. 2. ^ Enoch xlviii. 3-7. 

• Enoch kii. 11, 14. 

6$ £ 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

It has long been rejected from the Bible 
by every branch of the Church save 
the barbarian Christians of Abyssinia. 
Are we, it may be asked, really to seek 
the origin of the title of our Lord, 
round which so many pathetic associa- 
tions have grown, in this fierce and 
narrow Jewish apocalypse? And if this 
was the hope of the Gospel, was it 
justified ? In what sense can it be 
said that the Kingdom of God was at 
hand ? 

These are fundamental questions for 
our estimate of Christianity, but they are 
equally fundamental for the criticism and 
exegesis of the Gospels. To those who 
have learned to see the vital principle of the 
Christian movement in this expectation of 
the supernatural Kingdom of God, sen- 
tence after sentence of the Gospels, saying 
after saying, parable after parable, falls 
into its place. And in no document is 
this clearer than in the Gospel of Mark. 
The answer we give to the second question 
will depend almost entirely upon our per- 
sonal attitude to the Church, to the Chris- 

66 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

tian movement as a whole. Christianity 
is Judaism recreated in a form that could 
thrive in, and ifinally absorb, the civilisa- 
tion of Europe : if Christianity be of God, 
then the Kingdom of God did come to 
men. It is the new dispensation of the 
Christian Church ; '' the new race of 
Christians " ^ are the citizens of the 
Kingdom of God. And Jesus Christ is, as 
Tacitus had rightly heard, " the originator 
of that name " ; not that he was the 
originator of the idea of the Kingdom 
of God, or that he was the teacher of 
the Christians, but because he was and 
remained the source of their inspiration. 
His words in part, but still more his life 
and death, kindled the fire of the Chris- 
tian movement. 

As for the Book of Enoch, the evidence 
does point very strongly to the great in- 
fluence it exercised on primitive Christian- 
ity. The date of Enoch is a matter of dis- 
pute, and the accepted theory is that it is 
made up of several parts, of different dates. 
But it is certainly Palestinian, and it 
^ The phrase is used, e.g,^ by Bardesanes. 

67 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

existed in its present form at the beginning 
of the Christian era. It is quoted by name 
in the Epistle of Jude, a letter that used to 
be dated much later than necessary, as long 
as apocalyptic ideas were out of fashion. 
It is certainly referred to in the First Epis- 
tle of Peter, whatever the date of that work 
may be ; and it was long held in honour 
among the Christians, who took it for a 
genuine prophecy of Enoch, " the seventh 
from Adam.'' But it is especially in the 
Gospels that we see its influence, in Q as 
much as in Mark. The theory of demons 
and demoniacal possession, implied in Luke 
xi. 24-26 (Matthew xii. 43-45), a passage 
certainly drawn from Q, is exactly that set 
forth at length in Enoch ; and the judg- 
ment scene in Matthew xxv. 31 ff. (^^ the 
Sheep and the Goats '') loses half its mean- 
ing, if the corresponding scene in Enoch 
Ixii., where '' the Son of Man '' is shown 
" sitting on the throne of his glory,'' be not 
presupposed. Enoch is crude and fierce, 
the corresponding words of the Gospel are 
instinct with spiritual power. Yes ; but 
" that is not first which is spiritual, but 
68 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

that which is natural, afterwards that 
which is spiritual. '^ 

The Gospel of Mark tells us how Jesus 
of Nazareth came announcing the impend- 
ing advent of the Kingdom of God and 
bidding those who heard to repent and 
prepare themselves. The population of 
Galilee are generally friendly, but then as 
always the number of those who are whole- 
hearted is few : the people as a whole do 
not repent.^ And, to adopt the imagery 
of Jesus' own parable of the Ear of Corn,^ if 
the fruit be not ripe, how can it be ex- 
pected that the Lord of the Harvest will 
put the sickle to the corn ? How can it 
be expected that God will bring in the 
New Age, if the people be not ready ? 
Jesus is conscious that he is the destined 
Messiah, but the time for his manifestation 
is not yet. To acclaim him as Messiah 
before the Kingdom of God comes is pre- 
mature.^ Meanwhile, Jesus has another 
work before him. He will go up to Jeru- 
salem. 

1 Mark viii. 12, 38 ; ix. 19. 2 Msnk iv. 26-29. 

^ Mark viii. 29, 30. 

69 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

It is evident from all the Gospel accounts 
that the adherents of the Galilean Prophet 
expected something great from the jour- 
ney to Jerusalem. But Jesus knows that 
he is setting out on a forlorn hope, and will 
have no one to follow after him who is not 
prepared to give up everything " for the 
Gospel," ^ What his own thoughts about 
this momentous expedition were may best 
be gathered from the Parable of the Wicked 
Husbandmen.^ Perhaps, after all, the na- 
tion and its rulers would reverence the Son 
of the Lord of the Vineyard, and would 
give at his summons the fruit of devotion 
and repentance. But it is clear that that 
was not the result that Jesus anticipated. 
Unless our Gospels embody a wholly dis- 
torted tradition, Jesus expected to die a 
violent death at the hands of the rulers 
of Jerusalem. His whole course of action 
was that of one who desires to precipitate 
a crisis which he believes to be inevitable. 

1 Mark viii. 34-36 ; x. 21 ff. 

2 Mark xii. i-ii. See Burkitt, The Parable of the 
Wicked Husbandmen^ in the Proceedings of the Third 
Congress of Religions, Oxford, 1908, vol. ii, 321-328. 

70 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

He did not announce himself as Messiah, 
yet he acted as if he were armed with 
complete authority. He refused to allow 
his actions to be supported by force ; God 
would justify him in due time. There 
was an hour in Gethsemane when he 
shrank from the ordeal ; there was a mo- 
ment on the cross v/hen he despaired. 
But with these exceptions he carried 
through the part of the Son of the Lord 
of the Vineyard without flinching to the 
end. 

The end of the Gospel of Mark is muti- 
lated ; the narrative breaks off suddenly at 
xvi. 8, in the midst of the alarm and amaze- 
ment of the women at the rock-cut tomb, 
who cannot find the body of Jesus. Had 
the true conclusion been preserved, no 
doubt we should have read of that appear- 
ance of the risen Lord to Peter/ which 
seems to have been psychologically the de- 
cisive rallying-point of the scattered and 
disheartened disciples. As we know, the 
new movement did not come to an end 
vnth the crucifixion. The Kingdom of 
^ I Cor. XV. 5 : cf, Mark xvi. 7, 

71 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

God was soon to be made manifest (so the 
little band that rallied round Peter con- 
tinued to believe), for their Master was not 
dead but had been raised to heiaven, to sit 
at God's right hand, till the Kingdom 
came at last, when Jesus of Nazareth 
who had been crucified would appear 
as Christ, as the Son of Man spoken of 
by Daniel, to judge the quick and the 
dead. 

Perhaps it was a dream, but at least it 
v/as a dream that captured the ancient 
world, and, as Professor Bacon says, in a 
phrase already quoted, ^^ mere reverence 
for an admired Teacher '' is not sufficient 
to account for the hopes and the claims of 
the Christians. And therefore the Gospel 
of Mark, which makes so much of transcen- 
dental hopes and claims, which bases so 
much on the personal ascendency of Jesus, 
is more likely to reflect the historical truth 
than any view which regards the mission 
of Jesus as " purely religio-ethical and 
humanitarian." ^ 

^ Bacon, Beginnings, p. xxxviii. 

72 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

Considerations of the kind put forward 
in this chapter appeal with different force 
to different minds, and it must be acknow- 
ledged that many students of early Chris- 
tianity still hesitate to accept the tale of 
the public career of Jesus as told in the 
Gospel of Mark, though it be the oldest 
source we possess. There are those who 
try to read between the lines, who think 
that behind the cross-bars of Jewish escha- 
tology and Pauline theologising they can 
discern a gracious, if shadowy figure, giv- 
ing utterance to " ethical ideas that are 
the essential element in the spiritual ex- 
perience of the modern world." ^ Pro- 
fessor Peabody, from whom I quote, goes 
on to say : *^ There is nothing apocalyptic 
in the parable of the Good Samaritan, or 
in the appropriation by Jesus of the two 
great commandments, or in the prayer for 
to-day's bread and the forgiveness of tres- 
passes, or in the praise of peace-making and 
purity of heart. Yet in these, and not in 

1 Professor W. Herrmann, quoted by F. G. Pea- 
body, Transactions of the Oxford Congress of Religions^ 
ii. 308. 

73 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

the mysterious prophecies of an approach- 
ing desolation, the conscience of the world 
has found its Counsellor and Guide.'' ^ 
Those who put the centre of gravity of 
our Lord's work in the enunciation of 
sayings such as these are undoubtedly 
dissatisfied with the proportions of 
the portrait sketched in the Gospel of 
Mark. 

A detailed reply might be made to argu- 
ments like Professor Peabody's. Indeed, 
the apocalyptic background behind much 
of our Lord's ethical teaching, notably 
that about " daily bread," can, I think, 
actually be recognised. But however this 
may be, for the student of history the first 
necessity is not to lay emphasis upon those 
parts of the remembered words of Jesus 
which happen to strike an immediate chord 
in our ethical consciousness. The first 
necessity is to place him in due relation to 
the strange and far-off time in which he 
lived among men. The first thing we have 
to account for is the enthusiasm and the 
devotion of those who claimed to be his 
^ Loct ciu p. 309. 

74 



GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 

followers and apostles. " Let the chil- 
dren first be filled " ; we must first of all 
think of our Lord in connexion with the 
aspirations of his own time and his own 
country, and be ourselves content with the 
crumbs that have fallen down into our 
very different world. After all, the table 
was spread for the lost sheep of the House 
of Israel, not for us. 

In the end, a frank recognition that the 
Gospel as a whole looks forward to near 
and overwhelming catastrophe may be 
found not inconsistent with due reverence 
for the always wonderful sayings that light 
up the Gospel story. However we may 
look at it, the rise of Christianity is a won- 
derful, a most wonderful tale. It must 
always remain a portent to be marvelled at, 
a thing that cannot wholly be explained. 
And it is therefore not surprising that 
Jesus himself cannot wholly be explained. 
It is not likely that he can really be 
comprehended under a modern formula, 
whether ecclesiastical or unecclesiastical. 
And therefore it is not likely that we are 
getting any nearer to historical truth, when 

75 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

we desert the earliest ascertainable histori- 
cal tradition about him, the tradition that 
is preserved for us in the Gospel according 
to Mark. 



76 



IV 

POSSIBLE "SOURCES" OF THE 
GOSPEL OF MARK 

Tradition says that the Gospel of Mark 
embodies St. Mark's reminiscences of what 
he had heard St. Peter say. On the whole, 
this is doubted by modern critics ; is it 
possible to obtain any plausible view on 
the subject ? The preceding section was 
necessary, in order to meet the general 
objection that Mark gives a distorted view 
of the Ministry ; but how does the case 
stand with regard to details ? Christian 
tradition, we may remark, does not repre- 
sent the number of original witnesses that 
were available as large. When St. Luke 
is describing the election of a thirteenth 
apostle to take the place of Judas Iscariot, 
he makes it plain that only two 

n 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

rallied band of Disciples had "companied'' 
with Peter and the rest from the beginning 
of the Ministry. 

It may further be noted that the ques- 
tion of St. Mark's sources has been greatly 
modified by the progress made with the 
Synoptic problem. So long as our three 
Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, and 
Luke were believed to be so many speci- 
mens of a common Evangelical tradition, 
it seemed impossible to particularise the 
sources of individual features of the narra- 
tive. Tradition connected St. Peter with 
our Second Gospel, but there is little in it 
about St. Peter that is not shared by the 
others ; so that it was difficult to under- 
stand what special part St. Peter could 
have had in it. But now conditions are 
changed. The Gospel of Mark is not 
simply more faithful than the others to the 
Synoptic norm : it was itself the originator 
of the Synoptic norm, the direct source of 
the " Synoptic '' element in the others. 
It. has become improbable that there was 
any common Evangelical tradition at all 
about the course of our Lord's Ministry. 

78 



POSSIBLE SOURCES OF MARK 

We no longer have to ask whether Mark 
has a better claim than Matthew or Luke 
to be regarded as the Gospel according to 
Peter ; we have now to ask whether Mark 
has a better claim to this title than the 
document or documents grouped under 
the sign Q, or than the Gospel of John, or 
than the types now represented hy vari- 
ous fragments from Oxyrhynchus. If, as 
seems likely, we have in the Gospel of 
Mark the tale of the Ministry of our Lord 
told for the first time as a connected whole 
from the Voice at the baptism till after 
his resurrection, what we have to ask is how 
far this narrative, this general scheme of 
the Ministry, is based upon what the 
Evangelist had gathered from Simon 
Peter. It may be as well to remind our- 
selves here that we do not know how 
far the narrative extended over the 
ground covered by St. Luke's Acts of 
the Apostles. The first half of that 
work ends with the name of John who 
was surnamed Mark, and it is plausible 
to suppose that it may have been in 
the work of Mark that our Third Evan- 

79 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

gelist came across the lifelike episode of 
Rhoda.^ 

Two remarks of Wellhausen about the 
Gospel of Mark may here be recorded. 
" The tradition which Mark embodies 
is comparatively full about Jerusalem, 
meagre about Galilee '' ; ^ i.e. the one 
Week in Jerusalem occupies more than a 
third of the whole narrative. And again : 
" The single scenes are often told in a life- 
like style without unessential additions 
and reflections, but they stand for the 
most part as a mere collection of discon- 
nected anecdotes." ^ These facts, as Well- 
hausen shows, form a serious objection to 
regarding Simon Peter, or any other Gali- 
lean, as the planner of the work ; but I 
venture to think they are consistent with 
the authorship of " John who was sur- 
named Mark." 

There is one incident in the Gospel of 
Mark which is absolutely pointless as it 
stands, namely, the incident of the youth 
who tried to follow Jesus after his arrest in 

^ Acts xii. 13 ff. 

2 Wellhausen, Einkitung, p. 52 ^ Ibid, p. 51. 

80 



POSSIBLE SOURCES OF MARK 

the Garden ; it is difficult to avoid the 
inference that the youth was the Evange- 
list himself, and that he is giving his per- 
sonal experience. Can we doubt that it 
was he who saw and heard in Gethsemane, 
when Peter and James and John were 
sleeping ? It may even be conjectured 
that the Last Supper itself was held in the 
house of Mary the mother of John Mark/ 
and that the dating by days, almost after 
the manner of a diary, which characterises 
the story from Palm Sunday onwards, 
corresponds to actual reminiscences of the 
author, who had lived through the events 
of that memorable week when a boy, and 
had himself been a witness of some of 
them. This assumes that the final visit 
to Jerusalem did indeed only last a week 
but I have endeavoured to show that the 
eschatological point of view, from which 
alone this short period is sufficient, is the 
true historical view. 

For the rest of the Ministry the Evan- 
gelist must have been dependent on the 

1 Cf. Acts xii. 12. 

8i F 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

information of others, and his narrative 
seems to me to be very much the kind 
of narrative that one in the position of 
John Mark might have been expected 
to compose. The earliest tradition — 
whatever it may be worth — does not 
represent Mark as writing in the life- 
time of Peter. The first generation 
of Christians, as we have already seen, 
took little thought for preserving 
" the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus 
Christ," and there is nothing to show 
that the Evangelist had taken in hand to 
draw up an account of the Ministry until 
the Apostles, and with them the first-hand 
memory of eye-witnesses of our Lord's 
public career, had gone to their long home. 
The memory that still lived was that of 
the tales which the eye-witness used to 
tell : that is, striking scenes were remem- 
bered, memorable sayings, memorable 
anecdotes, rather than the sequence and 
proportion of the whole as it might have 
appeared to an outsider. The impression 
I get on reading the Gospel according to 
Mark is that many of the tales may be 

8a 



POSSIBLE SOURCES OF MARK 

traditional, told perhaps again and again, 
and that some are already on the point of 
becoming conventionalised and epic, but 
that the sequence of them, the general 
scheme of the Ministry as a whole, is being 
constructed by the Evangelist for the first 
time. " Mark wrote down accurately, 
though not in order, all that he remem- 
bered '' ; is it not possible that the con- 
fused statement of Papias really implies 
no more than this, that no traditional 
sequence, no itinerary of our Lord's foot- 
steps, was ever preserved by those who 
accompanied him ? 

Be this as it may, the Gospel of Mark, 
notwithstanding that it is the foundation 
for the other Synoptic Gospels, gives us 
only a disjointed narrative. Up to viii. 27 
it is not much more than a collection 
of anecdotes. At viii. 27 begins the 
journey to Jerusalem from the north : 
from that point we need not doubt 
that Mark presents a chronological 
series of events, though even here 
there are gaps about which little is 
said. But all that goes before might 

83 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

more appropriately be called " scenes 
from the Ministry of Jesus " than an 
account of the Ministry. At the same 
time the scenes, speaking generally, appear 
to be arranged in their natural order : I 
see no reason for doubting that the revival 
in Galilee,^ the call of Simon with the 
first preaching at Capernaum,^ the breach 
with the Pharisees,^ the sending out of the 
twelve/ " the feeding of the five thou- 
sand '' followed by wanderings out of 
Galilee,^ the voyage to Bethsaida and on to 
Csesarea Philippi/ represent the real se- 
quence of events. Certainly nothing that 
is to be found in any other of the Gospels 
has any better claim to give the true 
sequence. 

* Mark i. 14 f. 2 j 16-39. 
3 ii -iii., culminating at iii. 6 

* vi. 7 ff. ^ vi. 30-vii. 31. 

* viii. 1-27. 



POSSIBLE SOURCES OF MARK 



Minor Inaccuracies of the Evangelist 

There are certain minor inaccuracies in 
the Gospel according to Mark that throw 
some light on the general standard of trust- 
worthiness that he may be supposed to 
attain. In Mark ii. 26 he represents Jesus 
as saying that David entered into the 
House of God and ate the shewbread when 
Abiathar was high priest.^ This is a mis- 
take ; the event occurred in the lifetime 
of Abiathar, but the high priest was not 
Abiathar, but his father Ahimelech (or, 
as some authorities call him, Abimelech). 
The importance of the matter is that it 
shows the Evangelist to have had a cer- 
tain measure of ignorance or carelessness, 
whether he were John Mark, or some one 
else. The clause is omitted by Matthew 
and Luke, presumably because of its incon- 
sistency with the Book of Samuel, though 
doubtless it stood in the copy of Mark they 
severally used. We learn therefore that 

^ See Swete's note on the passage. 

85 



OURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

Mark is capable of perpetrating a historical 
blunder in a matter of " Jewish Anti- 
quities/' in regard to which he might well 
have been better informed. 

It would not have been worth while to 
call attention to this well-known piece of 
inaccuracy, w^ere it not that there are 
several others which appear to me to be of 
essentially the same nature, i.e. that they 
arise sim.ply from carelessness and confu- 
sion in the writer.^ As, however, certain 
of them seem to imply an inaccurate know- 
ledge of Jewish customs rather than an in- 
accurate knowledge of the Old Testament, 
they have been held to indicate that the 
Evangelist had not himself been born a 
Jew. The first is the statement in Mark 
vii. 3 ff., that " the Pharisees and all the 
Jews " regularly practised certain ablu- 
tions, some of which (it is said) were prac- 
tised only by those of priestly descent. 
Accepting this correction, we may surely 

^ It may be noted here that, according to Josephus, 
the first husband of Herodias was not called Philip, as 
in Mark vi. 17, but Herod. The mistake is silently 
corrected in Luke iii. 19. 

86 



POSSIBLE SOURCES OF MARK 

regard the exaggeration in vii. 3 ff. as 
merely a piece of carelessness, similar to 
that about Abiathar. If Mark was the 
cousin of Barnabas the Levite/ he may 
have confused ritual that he had seen 
practised in the home of his boyhood with 
the customs observed by all his fellow 
countrymen. 

The other matter is more serious. The 
Second Evangelist is the chief authority 
for identifying the Last Supper with the 
paschal meal, an identification which seems 
to contradict all the other traditions about 
the date of the crucifixion, including that 
which served as the foundation for the 
narrative of the Second Gospel itself, and 
to be exceedingly improbable historically. 
Moreover, the Evangelist introduces this 
peculiar date by what is practically a con- 
tradiction in terms. ^ It is held by many 
scholars that no Jew could have perpe- 
trated this statement, for the first day of 
the unleavened bread was the 15th of 

1 Colossians iv. 10. 

2 Mark xiv. 12 : "On the first day of the unleavened 
bread, when they used to sacrifice the passover.'* 

87 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

Nisan ; but they used to sacrifice the pass- 
over on the 14th of Nisan. ^ 

The error is a very curious and impor- 
tant one, and I think that Professor Bacon 
is right in connecting it with the mainte- 
nance of the Roman practice of celebrating 
Easter always on a Sunday, and not, as the 
ancient churches of Asia Minor did, by the 
days of the Jewish month.^ Be that as it 
may, the statement in Mark xiv. 12 after 
all only argues the same inattention to the 
Old Testament as that about Abiathar in 
Mark ii. 26, for the statements in Leviticus 
xxiii. 5, 6, about the dates of Passover and 
Unleavened Bread, are perfectly clear to 
every one that reads them, be he Jew or 
Gentile. Moreover, if you reckon by 
Roman (and English) days, the slaying of 

^ According to our reckoning these two events fell 
oa the same civil day, for the Jewish day begins at 
su^aset. The first day of Unleavened Bread (Nisan 15) 
begins at sunset, the paschal lambs having been slain a 
few hoars before on v/hat we should call the same day, 
but which the Jews reckoned as the closing hours of 
Nisan 14. 

2 Bacon, Beginnings of Gospel Story, pp. xxix. if., 195- 
198. 

88 



POSSIBLE SOURCES OF MARK 

the paschal lambs and the eating of the 
paschal meal with unleavened bread did 
take place on the same " day." The mis- 
dating of the Last Supper, whereby the 
Jewish Passover is turned into the first 
Christian Eucharist, is a more serious 
matter than a mere careless confusion 
between Jewish and Roman " days," but 
it is quite possible that the Easter Eucha- 
ristic Feast was already regarded in Rome 
as the Christian equivalent of the Jewish 
Passover meal when St. Mark wrote, and 
that he had to harm.onise this view as best 
he could with the historical data that had 
been transmitted to him. 

A word may be said here upon the cha- 
racter of the special references to St. Peter 
in the Gospel according to Mark. " Sight 
by hypnotic suggestion has few more 
curious illustrations than the discovery by 
writers under the spell of the Papias tradi- 
tion of traces in Mark of special regard for 
Peter ! " says Professor Bacon.^ But why 
should a narrative founded upon Peter's 
reminiscences show special regard for 
1 Beginnings, p. xxv. 

89 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

Peter ? If there be any foundation for the 
tradition which connects the Gospel of 
Mark with the reminiscences of Simon 
Peter, — and apart from this connexion it 
is not easy to understand how this Gospel 
came to be preserved at all, — then we may 
expect to find in it features of the Ministry 
of Jesus that were really fixed in Peter's 
mind rather than adumbrations of " Pet- 
rine claims." Peter may never appear 
individually on the scene except for pur- 
poses of rebuke, as Professor Bacon re- 
marks ; ^ but is this feature of the narra- 
tive unlikely to have proceeded from Peter 
himself ? All the Gospels tell the story 
of Peter's confession of Jesus as the Christ : 
it was indeed a historical moment of 
immense importance for the company of 
disciples. But is it psychologically un- 
suitable that the Gospel which tradition 
associates with the reminiscences of 
Simon Peter should also emphasise the 
rebuke which the Master administered 
to him almost at the moment of his 
confession ? 

^ BeginningSy p. xxvii. 

90 



POSSIBLE SOURCES OF MARK 

Apart from this, the general character 
of the Gospel seems to me to harmonise 
well enough with the tradition that Mark's 
main source for his work was the tales he 
had heard from St. Peter. It is from the 
time of the '' call '' of Peter that the narra- 
tive first becomes particularised, and it is 
mainly round the Sea of Galilee that re- 
corded incidents occur. Had the end of 
Mark been preserved, there can be little 
doubt, from the mention of Peter in xvi. 7, 
that we should have had a more detailed 
account of what Peter saw of his risen Lord 
than can be conjectured from Luke xxiv. 
34 and I Corinthians xv. 5. The real 
objection raised against regarding St. 
Peter as the main authority for the stories 
told in the Second Gospel is that the re- 
sulting picture of Jesus Christ is inadequate 
or false. But I have attempted to show 
that, if we frankly accept the eschatological 
point of view, there is little difficulty in 
accepting the main outlines of the narra- 
tive as a not unfaithful picture of the 
general course of the Ministry. 

Not all the tales in the second Gospel 

9^ 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

need be supposed to come direct from St. 
Peter or from the youthful reminiscences 
of the Evangelist. I have elsewhere ^ 
suggested that the tale of the Demoniac 
and the Swine ^ may have come to the 
Evangelist from Gerasa rather than direct 
from the companions of Jesus. Where 
and how the story of Herod and John the 
Baptist took shape it is impossible to say : 
Josephus ^ tells us that many people in 
Galilee regarded the defeat of Antipas by 
the Arabian King Aretas, his aggrieved 
father-in-law, as a judgment upon him 
for his unlawful marriage with Herodias. 
To sum up, the view of the Gospel 
according to Mark here advanced is that it 
is a work put together by one who seem.s 
to have been present as a youth at the 
arrest of Jesus in Gethsemane, but was not 
otherwise a companion of the Ministry. 
A generation later he formed the design 
of writing an account of the public career 
of the Lord, after almost all the witnesses 
had died, naturally or as martyrs. There 

^ Journal of Biblical Literature^ xxvii. 132. 
2 Mark v. 20 ^ Antiquities^ xviii. 5, 2. 

q2 



POSSIBLE SOURCES OF MARK 

is no valid reason to doubt that during 
some part of his adult life he had accom- 
panied St. Peter, and that he has derived 
much of his material from what Peter had 
told him. But there is nothing to make 
us suppose that the general plan of the 
work comes from St. Peter, or that the 
first half of it should be regarded as more 
than a collection of anecdotes, arranged 
only in approximate chronological se- 
quence. From the time of Peter's con- 
fession in the country of Caesarea Philippi 
we get a real sequence of events, con- 
ditioned by the real nexus of the journey 
south to Jerusalem, though the sequence 
is not without gaps. For the week's stay 
in (or rather, near) Jerusalem at the Pass- 
over, we have a chronological scheme that 
may be accepted as historical, though it is 
disfigured by a serious inconsistency, 
whereby the Last Supper is reckoned as a 
Paschal Meal. This, however, was dic- 
tated by liturgical rather than historical 
reasons, and is contradicted by the rest of 
th^ narrative. It is assumed here that the 
Gospel is imperfect at the end, and it is 

93 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

regarded as not unlikely that it originally 
extended over much of the period covered 
by the first twelve chapters of the Acts of 
the Apostles. 



94 



THE COMPOSITION OF MATTHEW 
AND LUKE 

The reasons which lead the present writer 
to believe that we cannot, with any ap- 
proach to certainty, reconstruct Q, the 
lost common source of Matthew and Luke, 
have been already given. Something may 
however be said of the methods which 
Matthew and Luke seem to have used in 
treating the material under their hand. 
From the way that they use the Gospel of 
Mark, which we actually possess, we may 
not unfairly conjecture how they treated 
their other sources, which we do not 
possess. 

It is perhaps advisable to point out in 
the first place that both Matthew and 
Luke treat Mark with entire literary free- 
dom. Mark is used by the other evan- 
gelists as valuable material ; but they 

95 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

freely omit what seemed to them unsuit- 
able or obscure, they add fresh material 
from other sources, working it into the 
Marcan narrative, each in accordance with 
his own literary methods, and they freely 
change the wording of the sayings and 
doings of Jesus. But while they are 
equally free in dealing with Mark, the 
manner in which they treat it is different. 
Matthew retains nearly all the material of 
Mark, and a plausible reason can be found 
for the omission of almost every verse that 
he does omit. But the matter from Mark 
is often welded together with matter from 
elsewhere, in such a way as to make it diflfi- 
cult to separate the two elements in detail.^ 
Luke, on the other hand, omits a good deal 
of Mark, but what he retains does not 
appear to be mixed with material gathered 
from elsewhere. The wording is often 

^ E,g, Matt. iv. 11^ doubtless comes from Mark i. 
13^. The story of the Centurion (Matt. viii. 5-13) and 
that of the two would-be followers (viii. 19-22) are 
inserted in the middle of a whole set of anecdotes taken 
from Mark. Matt. xii. 22-32 is welded together from 
Mark iii. 20-30 and from the source of Luke xi. 14-23, 
xii. 10. 

96 



MATTHEW AND LUKE 

greatly altered, but this comes from the 
literary style and method of Luke, not 
from the introduction of fresh documents. 
Moreover Luke follows the order of Mark 
in the sections based upon Mark, while 
Matthew entirely rearranges the order of 
Mark's anecdotes of the early part of the 
Galilean Ministry. 

These characteristic differences can be 
expressed in a single sentence. The 
Gospel according to Matthew is a fresh 
edition of Marky revised, rearranged, and 
enriched with new material ; the Gospel 
according to Luke is a new historical zvork^ 
made by com.bining parts of Mark with 
parts of other documents. 

Generalisations like this have always in 
them something of over-statement and 
of paradox. The essential point is, that 
while the additions to the Marcan frame- 
work in Matthew have been combined and 
altered by the evangelist to fit them into 
their place in that framework, the non- 
Marcan matter in Luke has not been com- 
bined with the Marcan matter. It would 
be impossible to reconstruct the first five 

97 ^ 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

chapters of Mark out of the Marcan matter 
preserved in Matthew iii.-xiii. 52, although 
almost every incident and parable is more 
or less adequately represented,^ because 
the anecdotes have been entirely re- 
arranged, and many of them have been 
interpolated with sayings of Jesus derived 
from other sources. The non-Marcan 
material has no doubt been treated in the 
same way, that is, it has been rearranged 
and recast by the evangelist. Sayings of 
Jesus upon cognate topics have been 
grouped together, whether with the 
Marcan material or otherwise (as in the 
o-called " Sermon on the Mount "), so 
that we cannot hope to reconstruct the 
original connexion of this non-Marcan 
material at all from the position it has 
come to occupy in the Gospel of Matthew. 
In the latter part of this Gospel Mark is 
followed strictly. Hardly anything of any 
length is omitted, though many fresh 
collections of sayings and a few fresh inci- 
dents, such as the earthquakes at the Death 

^ The exceptions are Mark i. 23-27, 35-39, iii- 9-12, 
2I5 iv. 26-29. 

98 



MATTHEW AND I.UKE 

on the Cross and at the appearance of the 
Angel at the Resurrection, are introduced 
into the framework of the Marcan narra- 
tive. Whatever the origin or value of 
these additions, they appear in Matthew 
as additions and enrichments to the main 
framework ; it would be fruitless to en- 
deavour to restore their original context 
from the use made of them by Matthew. 

With the Gospel of Luke it is different. 
In Luke much of Mark is omitted, and the 
thread of the Marcan narrative is often 
dropped altogether. But where Mark is 
being followed, it is followed to the exclu- 
sion of other sources and is generally taken 
up again almost at the place where it had 
been dropped.^ The question therefore 

1 Luke follows Mark throughout five sections of his 
GosDel. viz. : 

Luke iv. 31-44 corresponds to Mark i. 21-39 



V. I2-V1. 19 




» 


„ 1. 40-111. 19 


viii. 4--ix. 50 




99 


„ iii. 31-ix. 40 
(with gaps) 


xviii. 15-43 




99 


,, X. 13-52 


xix. 29-xxii. 


H 


99 


„ xi. l-xiv. 17 



In these five sections the only non-Marcan matter is 

99 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

naturally arises whether the non-Marcan 
material in Luke may not have beentreated 
in much the same way, that is to say, that 
the non-Marcan material stands in Luke 
in the same order as it stood in the docu- 
ment or documents out of which Luke 
derived them, and that the thread of it is 
taken up almost at the places where it has 
been successively dropped. 

It is remarkable how coherent a narra- 
tive of our Lord's Ministry we get if we 
study the non-Marcan material in Luke 
by itself. In outline it runs as follows : 
After the Baptism and Temptation Jesus 

Luke V. 39, xix. 39-44. Much of Mark that falls within 
the compass of these sections is omitted, viz., Mark iii. 
20-30, vi. 1-6, 17-29, vi. 45-viii. 26, X. 35-45, and various 
bits of xi.-xiv. But very little has been dropped at the 
beginnings and ends of these sections of Luke. Luke v. 
12 takes up Mark v^here it had been left at Luke iv. 44. 
Only Mark iii. 20-30 is passed over between Luke vi. 19 
and viii. 4, and only Mark ix. 41-x. 12 {i.e. twenty verses 
only) is passed over between Luke ix. 50 and xviii. 15, 
while nothing of Mark is dropped between Luke xviii. 
43 and xix. 29. The only serious transposition of the 
Marcan matter in these sections is that Mark iii. 31-35 
(" Who is my Mother or my Brethren ? ") is placed after 
the Parables instead of before them, 

100 



A4ATTHEW AND LUKE 

left " Nazara " ^ and came to the Sea of 
Gennesaret, where Simon Peter became 
his disciple.^ We hear of Jesus at Caper- 
naum ^ and at Nain/ as he goes " through 
city and village, bringing the announce- 
ment of the Kingdom of God, and the 
Twelve wdth him and certain women,'' of 
whom three are named. ^ Then, " when 
the days of his ascension were fuljfilled, he 
set his face to go to Jerusalem," ^ passing 
Samaritan country on the way,''^ though 
most of the anecdotes here related still 
involve a Galilean setting, with synagogues 
and Pharisees and " multitudes " of 
hearers.® After the parable of the Phari- 
see and the tax-gatherer comes the story 
of Zacchaeus the tax-gatherer.^ So Jesus 
journeys on, going up to Jerusalem, and 

1 Luke iii.-v. I S. ; note the spelling Nazara in Luke 
iv. 1 6, which reappears in Matt. iv. 13. 

2 Luke V. I ff. ^ Luke vii. I. 
* Luke vii. II. 

^ Luke viii. 1-4. ® Luke ix. 51 ff. ; xiii. 22. 

"^ Luke ix. 52, xvii. II. 

® Luke xiii. 10, xiv. I ; x. 25, xi. 37, xiii. 31, &c. ; 
xi. 14, xiv. 25, &c. 
® Luke xviii. 9-14? xix. i ff 

lOI 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

when he comes near he weeps over it.^ 
Little is said by Luke of the public activity 
of Jesus in Jerusalem that is not taken from 
Mark, but we are given a fresh account of 
the Last Supper,^ and much of the Trial 
of Jesus is independent of Mark, together 
with nearly all the Lucan account of the 
Resurrection. 

It is as impossible to reconstruct St. 
Luke's sources from St. Luke's own nar- 
rative by the help of our knowledge of his 
literary methods, as it is to reconstruct Q 
from the common matter of Matthew and 
Luke. But it seems to me that we do 
catch a glimpse of this other source of 
Luke, especially when we join together, 
as I think we have a right to do, Luke viii. 
1-4 and ix. 51 ff. And then we must ask 
if this source can be anything else but Q 
itself ? 

I doubt very much whether we can get 
much beyond this stage of queries and un- 
certainties. But it is well to insist upon 
the fact of our uncertainty, in order to 

^ Luke xix. 28, 41-44. 

' Luke xxii. 15, 16, 21, 24-38. 

102 



MATTHEW AND LUKE 

avoid building pleasing but insecure theo- 
ries upon unsound literary foundations. 
Q remains an unknown quantity, for all 
that some students have begun to treat 
Harnack's reconstruction of it (or its prac- 
tical equivalent) as if it had been really 
discovered, and as if we knew both what 
it contained and what it left out of the 
Gospel History. 

There are two theories popular at the 
present time, which seem to me especially 
insecure : viz. the theory that Q con- 
tained no story of the Passion and the 
theory of the " Peraean Document." 

The theory that Q contained no story of 
the Passion rests on the absence from 
Matthew, in the Story of the Passion, o. 
any fresh material that reappears in Luke. 
Assuming this argument to be decisive (as 
Harnack and others do), and remembering 
also that Q is no mere collection of Say- 
ings of Jesus, but a document that con- 
tained the stories of the Baptism and 
Temptation of Jesus and of the healing of 
the Centurion's son — a document more- 
over w^hich gave prominence to the escha- 
103 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

tological hope/ we should be forced to the 
conclusion that it must have been compiled 
at a very early date, when the first genera- 
tion of disciples was still living and the 
Death and Resurrection of the Lord was 
still not regarded as typical of an expe- 
rience which all Christians must undergo. 
This is the stage, to use the striking phrase 
of Professor Lake, when not " Christ is 
risen '' but Maranatha (" Our Lord, 
come ! ") was the watchword of Chris- 
tianity. 

But such deductions assume the main 
theory that the unknown Q had no Pas- 
sion-story. This still seems to me doubt- 
ful : I would sooner believe that the pecu- 
liar element in the Lucan Passion-story 
was derived from Q. It is true that we 
have in the " Didache " a Christian docu- 
ment that makes much of the watchword 
Maranatha and all that it implies, while 
it is silent about the Passion. But the 
" Didache " does not profess to relate the 
Gospel story at all : <• I find it difficult to 

1 E,g,^ Luke xii. 35 ff., xvii. 20-37, ^i- 2^~30, and 
the parallels in Matthew. 

104 



MATTHEW AND LUKE 

believe that a document like Q, which on 
any hypothesis goes into some detail about 
the Ministry of Jesus, could have been 
silent about the end of his earthly career. 
Had Q been a mere collection of sayings the 
silence would have been credible, but we 
are obliged to allow for the presence of the 
story of the healing of the Centurion's boy. 
And I venture to think that the absence 
of Lucan parallels in Matthew's story of 
the Passion is not so very surprising, when 
we regard the Gospel according to Mat- 
thew as what I have called it above ; viz. 
a fresh edition of Mark rather than a new 
historical work. Many and important as 
are the additions which Matthew makes 
to Mark, it is noteworthy that very few of 
them interrupt the actual course of the 
narrative. The '' Sermon on the Mount '^ 
takes three chapters, but in time and place 
it corresponds to Mark iii. 1 3 . Matthew x. 
corresponds to Mark vi. 7~ii. Mark iv. 
33 tells us that " with such parables '' 
Jesus spoke to them the Word ; Matthew 
in chapter xiii. gives half a dozen of these 
parables. And this is carried out all 
105 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

through the Gospel ; the added Sayings of 
Jesus and the few added anecdotes all slip 
easily into the Marcan framework. They 
have been torn from their original context 
and fitted into Matthew's slightly revised 
edition of Mark, to serve as illustrations 
and enrichments. If Q did contain a Pas- 
sion-story and Matthew made use of it, we 
need not be surprised to find fragments of 
it elsewhere than in the Passion-story of 
Matthew, because Matthew is not combin- 
ing Q with Mark, but enriching and illus- 
trating Mark from Q and other sources. 
For these reasons I think it quite probable 
that Q had a story of the Passion, and I 
think it not unlikely that some of it is pre- 
served among the peculiar sections of 
Luke xxii.-xxiv.^ 

The other theory that seems to me haz- 
ardous is the identification of the so-called 
*^ Persean '' source of Luke. In its crudest 
form this theory regards the long section, 
Luke ix. 51-xviii. 14, which corresponds 
roughly to the single verse Mark x. i, as 
giving from some peculiar source an 

* Notably in Luke xxii. 15 f., 24-32, 35-38. 
106 



MATTHEW AND LUKE 

account of the teaching of Jesus during his 
journey to Jerusalem through Peraea, the 
country on the other side of Jordan.^ But 
much of this section obviously belongs to 
Q (e.g. ix. S7~^^^ ^- iS^^S)? ^^^ we have 
seen that its opening words seem to form 
the continuation of Luke viii. 1-4. It 
seems to me impossible to distinguish 
." Luke's special source," as it is sometimes 
called, from Q itself, while we must not 
iorget that the unity of the fragments 
which modern scholars have called Q is still 
an unproven hypothesis. What was the 
source from which Luke derived the para- 
bles of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal 
Son, the Unjust Judge, the Pharisee and 
the Publican ? I fear it must continue to 
remain uncertain. They have come to us 
from St. Luke's hands, and we are left to 
conjecture whence he came to know them, 
or what amount of rewriting they may 
have received when he incorporated them 
into his work. 

^ It should be noted that according to Luke our Lord 
goes through Samaritan villages, and never is represented 
to have crossed the Jordan at all. 

107 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

The plan of this little book does not in- 
clude a discussion of the historical value of 
the Fourth Gospel, or of the remarkably 
divergent stories of the Birth of Christ 
which form the preface to the Gospel, ac- 
cording to Matthew and Luke. There can 
be no doubt that the earliest sources for the 
Life of Jesus are the Gospel of Mark and 
the source (or sources) which it is con- 
venient to call Q. What has here been at- 
tempted has been to vindicate the general 
historical faithfulness of the picture of our 
Lord's Ministry sketched in Mark, and to 
plead for caution in dealing with the un- 
known Q, a document which the extant 
evidence does not allow us to reconstruct 
in detail. 

Were the reconstruction of Q possible, 
were the unlikely to happen and a copy of 
this long-lost product of primitive Chris- 
tianity to be dug up by the spade of a 
modern investigator, it would indeed be a 
historical jewel of inestimable value. As 
matters stand, the jewel as a whole is for us 
irrecoverable, but we have in Matthew and 
Luke many of the detached gems out of 
io8 



MATTHEW AND LUKE 

which it was composed. And so much has 
been said in these pages of the superior his- 
torical value of the Gospel of Mark, as com- 
pared with those of Matthew and Luke, 
that it may be well to conclude hy pointing 
out the very considerable degree of faithful- 
ness and historical intelligence which these 
two evangelists exhibit in essentials, however 
much the modern investigator may find the 
naive and unhellenic narrative of Mark 
more useful as a basis from which to work. 
For the same method, — the comparison 
of the narrative of Mark as reproduced in 
Matthew and Luke with the text of Mark 
itself, — ^which showed us that we could 
not reconstruct Mark as a whole from its 
use by Matthew and Luke, shows at the 
same time that the parts of Mark which 
have been so used are retold without essen- 
tial injury. We stand indeed further off 
from the scene, and we can no longer dis- 
cern some characteristic lines in the Por- 
trait of Jesus, when we look at it from the 
point of view of Matthew or Luke instead 
of that of Mark ; but the figure is the same 
in essentials. As Matthew and Luke have 
109 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

treated Mark, so no doubt they have 
treated Q, and if they have retained the 
essential when they have made use of Mark 
they will have retained the essential when 
they have made use of Q. 

The very considerable amount of the 
wording of Mark that Matthew has re- 
tained, while it is among the chief pieces 
of evidence that prove Mark to have been 
used by him, is also a proof that it has been 
used with fidelity. But more than this, 
the general arrangement of the Gospel ac- 
cording to Matthew shows that Mark has 
been used with intelligence and skill. The 
divisions of the narrative that Matthew 
emphasises are the real turning points. 
The first part of the Ministry leads up to 
Peter's confession of Jesus as the Messiah, 
and the second part, containing the story 
of the Journey to Jerusalem and the Doc- 
trine of the Cross, starts off at Matthew 
xvi. 21 with the same formula (" From then 
began Jesus . . .") as is used in iv. 17 to 
begin the first part. Much of the matter 
taken from Mark in the first part has in- 
deed been rearranged, but after all it was 

IIQ 



MATTHEW AND LUKE 

little more in the original than a collection 
of anecdotes. The decisive moment of the 
open rupture between Jesus and the Phari- 
sees in the Synagogue ^ has been not inap- 
propriately deferred, and it is emphasised 
after the evangelist's manner by a formal 
quotation from the Old Testament. In 
the second part of the Ministry Matthew^ 
follows Mark paragraph by paragraph, 
merely condensing what seemed to be 
superfluities and adding here and there 
fresh sayings and legends. Some of the 
freshness of Mark is gone, and the style has 
a certain hieratic and set character, which 
seems like a premonition of future eccle- 
siastical use. No one can doubt that the 
Gospel of Matthew is better suited than 
the Gospel of Mark for reading aloud in 
church. But both tell the same story ; 
the outlines of the picture remain the 
same. May we not therefore believe that 
Q was treated with similar intelligence, 
even though the plan of Matthew did 
not allow the fragments taken from Q to 
cohere in their original context ? 

^ Matt. xii. 14, corresponding to Mark iii. 6 
III 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

As we have seen, the plan of the Gos- 
pel of Luke is very different from that of 
Matthevv^ : it is a combination of Mark 
with other sources rather than an enrich- 
ment of Mark from other sources. Much 
of Mark was dropped altogether in the 
process, including the general plan of the 
work. The Ministry of the Christ has be- 
come timeless : '^ the acceptable year of 
the Lord '' is a moment of which the com- 
ponent parts are practically indistinguish- 
able, except that it ends with the arrival 
at Jerusalem and the Passion ; we lose 
sight of the story told by Mark as a con- 
nected whole. But the parts of Mark that 
are retained are faithfully treated ; they 
are given in their proper order and are 
very little mixed with other matter. We 
have therefore some reason for assuming 
that Luke's other sources have been given 
in their proper order, without much ex- 
traneous mixture. The evangelist indeed 
professes to write '' in order '' (Luke i. 3), 
and judging by his treatment of that one 
of his sources which we actually possess, 
this appears to mean that he has preferred 



\ 



-\ 



MATTHEW AND LUKE 

to dovetail them together rather than make 
a new arrangement of their contents. 

One special point may be singled out. It 
has often been noticed that St. Luke's 
Gospel is eminently the Gospel of women. 
The Nativity story is told from the wo- 
man's point of view : the woman that 
was a sinner, the women who minister to 
Jesus, " the daughter of Abraham '' who 
was healed, the " daughters of Jerusalem '' 
who stand on the way to the Crucifixion, 
the Woman with the Ten Pieces of Silver, 
the Importunate Widow — all these have 
come down to us only through the Gospel 
of Luke. It is therefore worth notice that 
no sympathetic elaborations are given to 
the stories of women taken from Mark's 
Gospel. The stories of Peter's wife's 
mother, of the Woman with an Issue, and 
of the Widow's Mites, are repeated in 
Luke from Mark, but no prominence is 
given to them ; they are, in fact, some- 
what curtailed. It seems therefore that 
the characteristic sympathy given to 
women and the stress laid upon the 
women's part in the Ministry of Jesus, 

113 H 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

belong rather to one or more of Luke's 
sources than to Luke himself. 

However that may be, we cannot doubt 
that all the sources used by Luke are 
given by him to us with certain character- 
istic alterations. His Gospel is like a new 
building made with old stones : they have 
been trimmed at the edges to make them 
fit, or at the least have been repointed with 
fresh mortar. We can see this for our- 
selves in the case of the stories taken from 
Mark, and doubtless the same process has 
been at work in the others. When Mark 
gives us the story of the man sick of the 
palsy, he tells us that it was at Capernaum, 
that there was a crowd of the inhabitants 
at the door and that '' some of the scribes " 
were sitting by ; ^ in Luke the place is left 
vague, but sitting by are ^' Pharisees and 
Teachers of the Law who had come from 
every village of Galilee and Judaea and 
Jerusalem."^ Csesarea Philippi and the 
last visit to Capernaum are not men- 
tioned by Luke. We cannot therefoie 
assume, as has been done by some scholars, 
1 Mark ii. i-6 ^ -j^^^q y^ j^^ 

114 



MATTHEW AND LUKE 

tHat the sources from which Luke 
drew besides Mark were themselves des- 
titute of place-names or of indications 
of time. 

It all comes to this, that we can do very 
little toward reconstructing the unknown 
sources used by Matthew and Luke, and 
that we have to depend on the faithfulness 
and intelligence of these writers, as well 
as on the excellence of the material they 
made use of. Our chief guide is the ana- 
logy afforded by their use of the Gospel of 
Mark, which we do possess and which is 
by far the most valuable source for the Life 
of Jesus now extant. And those who take 
in hand to draw up an account of the few 
decisive months of the public career of 
Jesus the Nazarene must follow the method 
rather of the Gospel of Matthew than of 
the Gospel of Luke. We may attempt to 
enrich and fill in the bare outline given 
in Mark, but Mark must remain through- 
out the basis and foundation of the whole. 
If the outline given in Mark be not his- 
torical, the extant material does not allow 
us to construct any other. 

US 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 



Note on Recent Reconstructions of " Q " 

Whether the contents of Q, the " Logian Source," 
can be safely inferred from a comparison of Matthew 
and Luke is a question at issue between scholars, about 
which sufficient has been already said in these pages. 
The object of this Note is merely to exhibit in a tabular 
form two recent attempts at reconstruction, so as to 
show what kind of document is meant, when Q is named 
in modern critical discussions. 

The two reconstructions are Professor Harnack's 
(" Spriiche und Reden Jesu," 1907) and Professor 
Stanton's (" The Gospels as Historical Documents," 
Part II., Cambridge, 1909). Harnack constructs Q 
from 59 or 60 sections of Matthew and Luke, of 
varying length, and discusses the wording of the 
several passages in detail ; with regard to the position 
of the more important passages (here numbered by me 
I-13) he declares himself practically satisfied.^ Stanton 
confines himself almost entirely to the contents of Q, 
i,e, his reconstruction does not attempt to settle the 
actual wording of the original document. 

In the following Table I give Professor Stanton's 
eight main divisions, somewhat shortening his titles of 
the sub-sections, for considerations of space. For the 
same reason I give only the references to Luke, in the 
order of which Stanton sees approximately the order of 
Q (p. 104). The right-hand column contains the corre- 
sponding sections of Harnack's Q. 

^ Sf ruche, p. 126. 

116 



MATTHEW AND LUKE 

Stanton, pp. 102-103. Harnack, p. 126. 

I. The ushering in of the Ministry of Christ, 

John the Baptist (Luke iii. 3, 7-9, 16 f.), la 
The Baptism (Luke iii. 21 f.). ih 

The Temptation (Luke iv. 1-13). Z 

IL The first stage in the preaching of the Gospel. 

Character of heirs of the Kingdom (Luke 

vi. 17-49).^ 3I 

The Centurion of Capernaum (Luke vii. 

.^~^^)- ..... 4 

Discourse about the Baptist (Luke vii. 18- 

28, 31-35). 6 

in. The extension of the Gospel, 

Missionary tour (Luke viii. l). [omitted] 

" Foxes have holes," &c. (Luke ix. 57-60).'! 
Harvest plenteous, labourers few (Luke x. 2) [ 5 ^ 
Directions to preachers (Luke x. 3-12, i^. j 

IV. The rejection and the reception of Divine truth. 

" Woe to thee, Chorazin," &c. (Luke x. 

13-15). 7 

" I thank Thee, Father," &c. (Luke x. 21 f .). 8^ 
" Blessed are your eyes," &c. (Luke x. 23 f.). (8i) 

^ Note that Harnack's 3 is larger than Stanton's II, : 
it includes, for instance, all Stanton's V. 

2 Harnack's 5 is larger than Stanton's III. : see below 
on VII. 

117 



SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 

V. Instruction on Prayer, 

The Lord's Prayer (Luke xi. 2-4). \ faris 
Be earnest in prayer (Luke xi. 9-13). J 0/3 



VL Jesus and his antagonists. 

The two great commandments (Luke x. 

25-28). {omitted] 

Beelzebub (Luke xi. 14 f., 17-23). \ 
The unclean spirit (Luke xi. 24-26). / ^ 

The Sign of Jonas (Luke xi. 16, 29-32). 10 

The lamp of the body is the eye (Luke xi. 

34-36). fart of 3 

•• Woe to you, Pharisees ! " &c. (Luke si, 

39-52). iij 

Vn. Exhortations to disciples in view of the opposition 
and other trials that awaited them. 

Confess me faithfully (Luke xii. 2-10). part of 5 
Consider the ravens (Luke xii. 22-34). part of 3 
The Son of Man coming as a thief (Luke^ 
xii. 39 f.). I 

Act as a prudent steward (Luke xii. 42- T ^3 

46). J 

Divisions; bear the cross (Luke xii 51-53, 
xiv. 26 f.). part of 5 

Mustard-seed and Leaven (Luke xiii. 18- 
21). ? 

Offences (Luke xvii. 1-4). ? 

Faith as a grain of mustard-seed (Luke 
xvii. S f.). I 

118 



MATTHEW AND LUKE 

Vill. The doom on Jerusalem and the things of the end, 

" Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! " &c. (Luke xiii. 

34 f-). Hi 

The Coming of the Son of Man (Luke xvii. 
22-37). I^ 

The sections marked in the right-hand column with 
(?) are uncertain in position according to Harnack, 
but are probably to be inserted very much where Stanton 
puts them Stanton's reconstruction of Q does not 
contain Harnack's § 14, i.e, " He that hath, to him shall 
be given," followed by the saying in Luke xxii. 28-30 
(= Matthew xix 28) about sitting on twelve thrones 
judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 



119 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bacon, B. W., l^he Beginnings of Gospel Story (Yale 
University Press, 1909). [A very suggestive his- 
torical Commentary on Mark. The most scientific 
exposition in English of the anti-eschatological point 
of viev^^.] 

BuRKiTT, F. C, The Gospel History and its Transmission 
(Edinburgh, 3rd ed., 191 1). [Attempts to show why 
the Church preserved an account of the foundation 
of Christianity which is on the whole historical.] 

BuRKiTT, F. C, The Historical Character of the Gospel 
of Mark (American Journal of Theology, vol. xv., 
pp. 169-193, Chicago, 1911). 

BuRKiTT, F. C, The Last Sapper and the Paschal Meal 
(Journal of Theological Studies, vol. xvii., pp. 291- 
297, Oxford, 1 91 6). [Two studies, in which the 
view of the Gospel of Mark indicated in this book 
is set forth in some detail.] 

CoNYBEARE, F. C, The Historical Christ (London, 
1 9 14). [A very clear and trenchant criticism, 
from a rationalist standpoint, of theories which 
assume that Jesus never existed.] 

121 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Harnack, a., Sprtlche und Reden Jesu (Leipzig, 1907), 
English translation, The Sayings of Jesus^ vol. xxiii. 
of the Crown Theological Library (London and New 
York, 1908). [The most notable attempt to recon- 
struct Q.] 

Hawkins, Sir J. C, Horae Synopttcae (Oxford, 2nd ed., 
1909). [The best analysis of the peculiarities of the 
several Synoptic Gospels, the various Tables being 
arranged with great intelligence as well as accuracy. 
Invaluable for all investigators of Synoptic problems.] 

Jackson, F. J. Foakes, and Lake, K., The Beginnings 
of Christianity, vol. i (London, 1920). [This large 
work, by a number of scholars, is planned to consist 
of at least four volumes, of which vol. ii. is promised 
for 1922. Vol. i., sect. 3, by the Editors and Prof. 
G. Foot Moore, is called Primitive Christianity 
(pp. 265-418) and contains some fresh investiga- 
tions of the keywords of the Gospel, such as *' King- 
dom of God, "Age to Come," "Son of Man," 
etc., which deserve the careful consideration of 
any one who studies the Gospel History.] 

Lake, K., The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection 
of Jesus Christ, vol. xxi. of the Crown Theological 
Library (London and New York, 1907). [I introduce 
this book here as the first example in original English 
work of the doctrine of the priority of Mark being 
consistently applied throughout a historical investi- 
gation.] 

LoisY, Alfred, Les Evangiles Synoftiques^ 2 vols. 
(Ceflonds, 1907, 1908). 

122 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

MoNTEFioRE, C. G., The Synoptic Gospels, 2 vols. 
(London, 1909), to be followed by a third volume 
of Notes by I. Abrahams. 

Sanday, W., The Life of Christ in Recent Research 
(Oxford, 1907). [Lectures, giving a readable survey 
of the previous twenty years of research.] 

Schweitzer, Albert, Von Reimarus zu Wrede (Tubin- 
gen, 1906). [The indispensable account of the 
attempt to write a " Life of Jesus," from the post- 
humous publication of the tracts of H. S. Reimarus 
by Lessing in 1778 to that of the late Professor W. 
Wrede's "Messiah-secret" in 1901. Schweitzer 
writes from a strongly eschatological point of view. 
An English translation by W. Montgomery, called 
The Quest of the Historical Jesus^ was published 
in London, 1910. 

It should further be added that the second edition 
of Schweitzer's Von Reimarus zu Wrede, which 
appeared in 191 3, is called Geschichte der Leben- 
Jesu-Forschung, and contains a great deal of inter- 
esting new matter.] 

Stanton, V. H., The Gospels as Historical Documents, 
Part IL (Cambridge, 1909). [A valuable and very 
full study of the Synoptic Problem.] 

Wellhausen, J., Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien 
(Berlin, 1905). — Das Evangelium Marci (Berlin, 
1903 ; 2nded., 1909). — Das Evangelium Matthaei 
(Berlin, 1904). — Das Evangelium Lucae (Berlin, 
1904).-— [These four books practically form one short 

123 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, with an Intro- 
duction prefixed. The fresh German translations 
of the Gospels themselves, the running commentary, 
and the introductory remarks, are all singularly acute 
and stimulating.] 

I cannot close this short Bibliography without 
remarking that those who wish to study Synoptic ques- 
tions should prepare themselves by underlining, 
whether in a Greek or an English New Testament, 
those words and sentences of Matthew and Luke that 
are found in Mark. The student should distinguish 
what is common to all three, what is common to Mat- 
thew and Mark only, what is com^mon to Luke and Mark 
only, what is common to Matthew and Luke only. 
There are several '^ Harmonies " and '' Synopses " on 
the market, some of which are very well arranged. But 
the grasp of the details of the subject which the student 
gains by marking the full unabridged texts for himself 
is worth all the Synopses that ever were compiled. 



124 



EPILOGUE 

This little Book is primarily concerned 
with the Sources for the Life of Jesus 
rather than with the detailed considera- 
tion of their contents. Its scope does 
not allow room for the examination of 
the views of other scholars, and I must 
employ the space at my disposal in giving 
some reasons why I still think that tradi- 
tion is correct which assigns the writing 
of the Second Gospel to John Mark, 
sometime the com^panion and interpreter 
of Simon Peter. 

We know so little of John Mark him.self, 
that in one sense it makes little difference 
whether he was the author, or some one 
else was ; but from another point of 
view Mark's authorship does exactly indi- 
cate not only the date of the Evangelist, 
but also his situation with regard to 
historical memory about the Gospel his- 
tory, and so to the historical authority 
of what he tells us. What I am saying 

125 



EPILOGUE 

here is an amplification of what has been 
already said on pp. 92, 93. 

It is not only the " vivid touches '' in 
Mark's narrative which make one feel 
that Mark is in some way connected with 
actual eye-witnesses, there are besides a 
number of places where the connexion 
between a word of Jesus and its historical 
occasion is found in Mark but obscured 
everywhere else. Thus the little boat 
waiting on Jesus because of the crowd 
(Mark iii. 9) is a vivid touch, which later 
Evangelists did not care to reproduce ; 
but equally striking is the connexion in 
which the famous saying, " Who is my 
mother and my brethren ? '' (Mark iii. 
33) is reported. In Matthew and Luke 
the harshness of this word is unmotived : 
in Mark, on the other hand, it is reported 
in connexion with Mark iii. 21, where we 
are told that the kinsmen of Jesus had 
come out to arrest him as a man out of 
his mind. Then, again, according to 
Mark xi. ii, the entry of Jesus with the 
Galilean crowd into Jerusalem ended 
tamely in a mere visit to the Temple, 

126 



EPILOGUE 

because it was too late to do more that 
day. This is not exactly a ^' vivid " 
touch, but it surely must come from the 
unaltered reminiscence of one who was 
present : Matthew and Luke, with greater 
dramatic effect, but with less historical 
probability, make the Cleansing of the 
Temple to follow immediately. These 
things, and the many things like them, 
do suggest that there are very few stages 
between the writer of the Second Gospel 
and what he writes about. 

On the other hand there are a great 
many things in this Gospel which are not 
like the account of an eye-witness, things 
which can hardly be the direct reminis- 
cences of St. Peter. Can we suppose 
them to have come from the pen of Mark, 
if he had been St. Peter's interpreter ? 
This is the consideration which makes so 
many critics reject the tradition of Marcan 
authorship. 

It is often forgotten what a deep gulf 
intervenes between the direct reminis- 
cences of an eye-witness and a collection 
of reminiscences from an eye-witness by 

127 



EPILOGUE 

some one else, especially when the collec- 
tion is first put together after the eye- 
witness' death. The second type of 
narration is already hearsay : the author 
knows what he has been told, he does not 
know what he has not been told, however 
near he may be in time to the events 
described. And the earliest tradition 
does make Mark write only after St. 
Peter was already dead, possibly some 
years after. There is nothing to show 
that St. Peter had attempted to teach 
Mark the outlines of the biography of 
Jesus, or even of the course of the Minis- 
try. This may seem a strange statement, 
but it is corroborated by the meagreness 
of the references in the Epistles to our 
Lord's doings and even to his words. I 
believe that it was the work of Mark 
which first made the biography of Jesus 
into a book of Christian devotion : it was 
Mark who first transformed the '' Gospel " 
into a " Life of Christ.'' Before him 
the " Gospel " had been the announce- 
ment of the new dispensation, Theology 
rather than Biography. 

u8 



EPILOGUE 

Like all pioneer work '' Mark '' had 
serious defects, and within a generation 
it was almost superseded by " Matthew," 
which I have described above as a second 
edition of Mark, revised and enlarged 
(p. 97). But the general scheme and out- 
line remained, as indeed it does (though to 
a lesser extent) in Luke. Luke removes 
several blemishes, especially where Mark 
had touched on public affairs, such as the 
death of John the Baptist and the trial 
of Jesus,! but he does not seem to have 
had any source that furnished him with 
what might be described as another Vita. 
What is outlined above, p. 100 fl., is 
rather a generalization and simplification 
of the Career of Jesus, than a fresh account. 
St. Mark's remains the only Itinerary of 
our Lord's footsteps that comes to us 
from the earliest times. 

! I take this opportunity of calling special attention 
to an article in the Journ, of Theol, Studies for Oct., 
1919 (vol. xxi., pp. 51-76), by H. Danby, called " The 
Bearing of the Rabbinical Criminal Code on the 
Jewish Trial Narratives in the Gospels." It seems 
to me a model specimen of historical criticism as 
applied to the Gospel narratives. 

129 I 



EPILOGUE 

I have attempted elsewhere, in the third 
and fourth items of the Bibliography, to 
consider the chief difficulties which have 
been found in the Second Gospel and to 
reconcile them v>^ith the tradition that 
Mark was the writer. But I venture to 
think that such works of reconcilement 
and explanation are subsidiary to that 
defence which consists in accepting the 
Messianic ideal set forth in the Gospel of 
Mark as, in essentials, the true historical 
picture of the mind of Jesus. " The 
messiahship of Jesu.s was a conviction of 
the inner circle of disciples, a secret from 
the multitude. The minds of this inner 
circle were running on ' thrones ' and 
the messianic glory shortly to be revealed. 
Jesus had not ' transformed the messianic 
idea ' (as is so often affirmed), but he 
was thinking less of the messianic glory 
than of the bitter cup that he must first 
drink and the deep waters in which he 
must be ' baptized.' 

" Nevertheless there is a sense, on the 
eschatological view, in which it is true 
to say that Jesus had radically changed 

130 



EPILOGUE 

the messianic ideal. He had changed it, 

not hy ' spirituaHzing ' it, but by adding 
to it. The ideal of King Messiah, coming 
in glory on the clouds of heaven to judge 
the world and vindicate the elect of God, 
he left untouched, but he prefixed to it 
a Prologue. He prefixed to it not a 
doctrine about Messiah, but the actual 
course of his own career. We call it his 
Ministry — ^why ? Because his view of 
the office of the Man who was predestined 
to be Messiah was that he should ' minis- 
ter ' to the needs of God's people (Mark 
X. 45). According to Mark, Jesus went 
up to Jerusalem to die, to be killed, 
believing that thereby the Kingdom of 
God would come. And his great resolve 
has to be judged in the light of its amaz- 
ing success '^ {Amer. Journ. of Theol. xv., 

P- 193)- 

It is because this view is set forth so 
clearly in the Gospel of Mark that I feel 
that the fewest possible links intervene 
between it and the facts. 

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